Gay Family Featured In Coke Super Bowl Ad, Bigots Attack Over Spot's Music

Last night's Super Bowl ad from Coca-Cola included a fleeting shots of two men holding hands on a skating ring with a young girl holding the hand of one of the men. But it was that the spot's music, America The Beautiful sung in foreign languages, that has brought out the haters. So far.

TIME Magazine recaps the reaction:

Coca Cola’s entry into the Super Bowl ad campaign had a message that was, as it were, Coke Classic: it celebrated the many kinds, colors, lifestyles and origins of Americans who are nonetheless one. Over a scene of these many Americans, it played a patriotic song: not the National Anthem, but the more accessible, singable “America the Beautiful.” It showed us a panoply of American faces, young, old, brown, white, straight, gay (it included what are said to be the first gay parents depicted in a Super Bowl ad), in cowboy hats and hijabs, playing, eating, and exploring all-American vistas. It was that last aspect that unfortunately, brought out America the Ugly, at least on some parts of the Internet. “WTF?” asked one post on Twitter. “@CocaCola has America the Beautiful being sung in different languages in a #SuperBowl commercial? We speak ENGLISH here, IDIOTS.” Some of the vitriol may have been satire for all I know, but there was much too much for that to explain all of the “English or GTFO” sentiment–not all of it in impeccable English itself. To wit: “Dear @CocaCola : America the beautiful is sang in English. Piss off. #DontFuckWithUs.” (To be fair, not every Tweet brought up by a search on “Coca Cola English” agreed: “Coca Cola brings the commercial of the night: America the Beautiful sung in Spanish, English, Arabic, and other languages. Beautiful.”)

AmericaBlog also has some of the ugliest tweets. The second clip below is Coke's behind-the-scenes recap of the making of the clip. At the 2:25 mark a gay man speaks briefly about discrimination over shots of his family on the skating rink. Is Coke doing some Sochi damage control?