Zola/YouTubeAn advert showing a lesbian couple getting married will return to The Hallmark Channel after social media users threatened to boycott it.
It comes after Hallmark gave in to conservative campaigners who argued the heartwarming ad was not ‘family friendly’, and took it off air.
However, Hallmark has now reversed its decision, which will no doubt dismay campaign group One Million Moms.
ICYMI, this is the, quite frankly beautiful, advert causing all the controversy:
The Hallmark Channel tends to be a popular one in the festive season due to its huge slate of Christmas programming, but the Zola.com advert has caused it to become surrounded in controversy.
The ad was one of six new commercials for the wedding planning and registry company, and showed two women exchanging vows and later kissing to celebrate their nuptials.
It started airing on December 2 but soon received backlash from anti-LGBTQ+ groups, which claimed the ad was not ‘family friendly’.
Hallmark pulled four of the six episodes, which showed same-sex couples, but kept up the remaining two, which only featured a heterosexual couple.
Zola/YouTubeUpon this news, One Million Moms – which also made headlines for kicking off about Toy Story 4 – were overjoyed, and Hallmark attempted to justify its decision by saying the women’s public displays of affection violated their policies, despite the straight couple engaging in the same PDA.
At the time, Sarah Kate Ellis, President and CEO of non-governmental media monitoring organisation GLAAD, which was founded by LGBT people in the media, slammed the move as ‘discriminatory’ and ‘hypocritical’.
In a statement, she said:
The Hallmark Channel’s decision to remove LGBTQ families in such a blatant way is discriminatory and especially hypocritical coming from a network that claims to present family programming and also recently stated they are ‘open’ to LGBTQ holiday movies.
As so many other TV and cable networks showcase, LGBTQ families are part of family programming. Advertisers on The Hallmark Channel should see this news and question whether they want to be associated with a network that chooses to bow to fringe anti-LGBTQ activist groups, which solely exist to harm LGBTQ families.
It goes without saying that the wonderful people of Twitter weren’t going to let it slide, and eventually social media users managed to put enough pressure on the channel to reverse its decision.
Zola/YouTubeOn Sunday, Hallmark’s parent company, Crown Media, said in a statement:
The Crown Media team has been agonising over this decision as we’ve seen the hurt it has unintentionally caused.
Hallmark will be working with GLAAD to better represent the LGBTQ community across our portfolio of brands.
The Hallmark Channel will be reaching out to Zola to reestablish our partnership and reinstate the commercials.
Personally, I believe nothing says Christmas spirit like two people sharing their love for one another, no matter their gender or sexual orientation.
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via [email protected]
Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.