OK, so picture the war room. It's what, 2014?
Right, 2014. And you are sitting at the top of
the human rights campaign, the HRC. You're the
heavyweight champion of LGBTQ advocacy. You have
all this momentum, right? The Northeast, the
West Coast. It's all on board. But then you have
this glaring, massive blank spot right on your
map, the American South. And the laws there aren't
just stagnant. No, they're actively moving backward.
The culture feels, I don't know, impenetrable.
So you have a choice. Exactly. Do you stay in
your safe zones, keep racking up wins in New
York and California? Or do you take millions
of dollars of donor money and light a fire in
what your own memos called the most religious
state in America? It's the ultimate risk it all
scenario. And they didn't just dip a toe in.
Not at all. They launched something called All
God's Children. And just hearing that name. It
doesn't sound like a political action committee
operation. No, it sounds like a sermon title.
Which is such a fascinating pivot. Today, we
aren't just talking about a marketing campaign.
We're doing a deep dive into what happens when,
you know, an unstoppable force meets an immovable
object. We're talking about the HRC trying to
crack the code of Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas.
And we need to be clear about the stakes here,
because this is not just a story about some.
uh heartwarming tv commercials no this is a story
about the messy expensive and sometimes dangerous
business of trying to well To manufacture cultural
change. Right. Because when you look at the source
material we have today, it's not all clean and
tidy. We've got the strategy documents, sure.
But we also have hard data on the economic penalties
of being gay in the South. We have the sociology
of why people actually change their minds. And
we have this very dark, very recent chapter.
A legal case that proves just how fragile this
kind of image politics can be. Yeah. That recent
case, the Walton County incident involving the
Zoolocks. That's a crucial piece of this whole
puzzle. It really is. It shows us the double
-edged sword of basing a civil rights movement
on the idea of the perfect family. But we'll
get to that. Okay, so first, we have to look
at the battlefield as it stood in 2014. Why Mississippi?
I mean, if you're a progressive advocacy group,
Mississippi feels like the boss level of a video
game you aren't equipped to beat. Well, to understand
the why, you really have to look at something
called the Social Climate Index. I saw that in
the notes. They gave the South a score of 55,
which I'm assuming is out of 100. Because if
that's a test score, you are re - Peeting the
grade. It's the lowest regional score in the
country. Yeah. Yeah. But let's peel back the
layers of that number because 55 is, you know,
it's abstract. Right. The Social Climate Index
isn't just a vibe check. It aggregates hard metrics.
Does the state have hate crime laws that include
sexual orientation? Are there employment non
-discrimination laws? Is there marriage equality?
Yeah. In the South, the answer to almost all
of those was no. And it goes beyond just the
laws, doesn't it? I was looking at the polling
data on... discomfort this isn't just about whether
you can get married it's about whether you can
exist visibly the data showed that discomfort
with public displays of affection or even seeing
a photo of a same -sex partner on a desk pulled
like five to ten percentage points higher in
the south that's the temperature of the room
and that temperature has a direct impact on your
wallet This is one of the most shocking statistics
from the research. The income gap. The income
gap. If you look at the economic reality for
same -sex couples with kids in the South, their
average household income was $11 ,000 lower than
heterosexual couples. $11 ,000. That just...
It completely upends the myth of gay affluence,
doesn't it? Oh, absolutely. You always hear about
the dink status, dual income, no kids marketing
agencies love that demographic. But in the South,
the reality was just significantly poorer and
more precarious. And that poverty gap cascades
into everything else. Health, for instance. Right.
Gay and bisexual men in the South had higher
HIV infection rates than anywhere else in the
United States. And coverage. Only 75 % of Southern
LGBTQ people even had health insurance. So you're
operating in an environment with less money,
more health risks, and fewer legal protections.
It's a compound fracture of social issues. And
standing over all of this, the laws, the economics,
the culture is the institution of the church.
You cannot tell the story of the South without
talking about the Southern Baptist Convention.
It's the dominant cultural force. In Mississippi
specifically, more than half the residents identify
as Southern Baptist. Exactly. The HRC knew this.
They explicitly referred to Mississippi as the
most religious state in America. Which brings
us back to the strategy. So if you are the HRC
and you know you're walking into the lion's den
of religious conservatism. You don't walk in
wearing a meat suit. Right. You don't go in with
confrontation. Confrontation just triggers a
defense mechanism. You've lost before you've
even started. If you come in as the northern
outsider telling southerners their values are
wrong, you've lost before you buy your first
ad slot. Yeah. So they did something counterintuitive.
They decided to speak the language of the locals.
All God's children. The strategy was built entirely
around shared values. They wanted to decouple
the idea of LGBTQ rights from the culture war.
And recouple it with Christian values of love
and family and non -judgment. Precisely. So let's
talk about the mechanics of this, because the
ad spend was, I mean, it was massive. We are
not talking about a grassroots flyer campaign.
Oh, no. This was an air war. A very expensive
one. It was an $8 .5 million investment over
three years for Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas.
For the Mississippi launch alone, they dropped
over $300 ,000 immediately. And the content of
these ads, I watched a few of them while prepping.
They're fascinating pieces of media. They didn't
use actors. They didn't use politicians. No,
they used the ultimate authority figures in Southern
culture. Moms. Moms. Specifically Christian moms.
One of the key spots featured a Southern Baptist
mother sitting in her kitchen talking about her
love for her gay son. She wasn't talking about
legislation, was she? Not at all. She was talking
about her faith in her child. It's like they
weaponized the mama bear archetype. You also
had gay army veterans. That feels like a very,
very deliberate choice. Of course. It's meant
to challenge the stereotype of what a gay man
looks like to a conservative audience. It creates
a permission structure, you know? It does. If
a viewer sees a veteran, someone who served the
country, someone who looks like their neighbor
or their nephew, it creates cognitive dissonance.
It forces the viewer to reconcile their prejudice
with their patriotism. And they threw in transgender.
students as well, which that was arguably the
hardest lift. But the framing was always we are
your neighbors. We are Christians. We are just
like you. And this brings up a concept in political
science called soft power versus hard power.
OK. Hard power is the law. The Supreme Court
rulings, the legislation. But hard power is brittle
if the culture rejects it. Right. You can change
a law, but if people hate it, they'll just find
ways around it, like those religious freedom
bills allowing businesses to deny service. Yeah.
So All God's Children was the soft power offensive.
It was an attempt to till the soil so that when
the legal changes came, they might actually take
root. And the timing was surgical. They launched
the Mississippi ads in November 2014, literally
48 hours before a federal court was set to hear
arguments on the state's same -sex marriage ban.
Wow. So they were trying to create a soft power
buffer for a hard power event. That's the idea.
So the $8 .5 million question, did it work? Because
you can spend a fortune on soft power and still
get absolutely nowhere. This is where the data
gets messy and really fascinating. If you just
look at the trend lines, support for same -sex
marriage in the South was already skyrocketing.
Before the campaign. Between 2003 and 2013, support
rose by 26 percentage points. That is a seismic
shift. I mean, in political terms, you rarely
see a 26 -point swing on a fundamental moral
issue in a single decade. It's huge. But here's
the catch. That 26 -point swing happened before
the All God's Children campaign really kicked
into high gear. So the HRC might have been surfing
the wave rather than creating it? Or at least,
they were paddling into a swell that was already
forming. Sociologists point to something called
the friends and family effect. Or the contact
hypothesis? Right. Gordon Allport. The idea that
prejudice thrives in abstraction. It's easy to
hate the gays as a concept. But it's much harder
to hate Days, your accountant, who brings decent
potato salad to the block party. That's it in
a nutshell. By 2014, about 64 % of Southerners
reported knowing someone personally who was gay
or lesbian. And once you cross that threshold...
Once the majority of the population has a personal
connection, the political opposition starts to
crumble because it conflicts with personal loyalty.
So you have this natural sociological engine
people coming out, just living their lives, driving
the numbers up, and then HRC comes in to accelerate
it. But we have to pivot here because you can't
drop a campaign like this into the Deep South
without generating some serious heat. The backlash
was immediate. The American Family Association
of Mississippi issued a statement almost instantly.
They argued that the normalization of homosexuality
was unacceptable. And their argument wasn't just,
we don't like this. It was theological. Yeah.
They basically said, you can show us all the
nice commercials you want, but biblically literate
Christians know better. They were banking on
the idea that dogma is stronger than emotion.
That no matter how nice the veteran of the commercial
is, the text is the text. But there is a deeper
risk to the strategy HRC used. This is where
we have to talk about the recent news. When you
build a campaign around respectability politics,
when you say, look at us, we are perfect parents,
we are safe, we are wholesome, you are making
a promise. You are. You're promising that the
marginalized group is just as virtuous, if not
more so than the majority. And if that image
cracks, the opposition will use that crack to
try and shatter the whole window. Which brings
us to the Walton County case. Yeah. To the Zoolocks.
Yeah. This is a heavy turn in the story, but
it's necessary to understand the current political
landscape. It is. The case involves a gay couple,
William and Zachary Zoolock, who are affiliated
with campaign efforts, specifically regarding
adoption rights. And they were granted custody
of two young boys. Yes. And the details that
came out in court are, they're horrific. We don't
need to be graphic, but we have to be clear.
These men abused those children. Systematically.
Between 2019 and July 2022, they utilized their
position of trust to abuse their adopted sons.
It was a catastrophic failure of the system and
a heinous crime. And justice was served. Eventually,
they were sentenced to 100 years in prison in
late 2024. But because this happened in the context
of a highly politicized debate about day adoption,
the crime didn't stay a local tragedy. It became
a national weapon. Yeah. This is the volatility
of the hearts and minds strategy. Prominent right
wing commentators, figures like Charlie Kirk
and Laura Ingraham, seized on this case immediately.
They used the Zulock name as a shorthand, didn't
they? They connected the specific crimes of these
two men to the broader argument against. same
-sex adoption yes the argument became you told
us gay parents were safe you told us they were
just like us look at this it's a classic generalization
tactic They conflated the actions of two criminals
with the validity of millions of families. And,
you know, Media Matters pushed back on this,
pointing out that bad actors exist in every demographic.
Heterosexual, homosexual, religious, secular.
Of course. Using one case to demonize an entire
population is a logical fallacy. It is, but emotionally,
it's effective. And that's the danger. When the
HRC spent millions selling the image of the good
gay family, they inadvertently raised the stakes.
If you live by the anecdote, you can die by the
anecdote. Exactly. The HRC used positive stories
to build trust. Their opponents use this one
negative story to try and destroy it. It really
highlights that soft power is a constant battle.
It's not a one -time purchase. You don't just
buy the ads in 2014 and declare victory. The
narrative is constantly being rewritten by events
on the ground. And that leads us to the synthesis
of this whole deep dive. The All God's Children
campaign was a massive, expensive experiment
in navigating that intersection of religion and
rights. It showed that you can move the needle
or at least grease the wheels with the right
messaging using Christian language, using local
voices. I mean, that was smart. It was. It allowed
people to evolve without feeling like they were
surrendering their identity. But the Zulock aftermath
and the persistent backlash show that the cultural
truce is fragile. The 26 percent rise in support
is real. That's the friends and family effect
at work. But the political weaponization of identity
is still very much alive. Very much so. So here's
the thought I want to leave everyone with. We
look at that eight point five million dollar
price tag. We look at the glossy commercials
and we tend to think that change comes from these
big top down initiatives. We want to believe
there's a master plan that works. But the data
suggests something more humble in a region where
personal relationships drive everything, where
who your daddy is and where you go to church
matters more than the law? Was the ad campaign
the hero of the story? Or was the real engine
of change simply the bravery of ordinary people
living their lives openly in a hostile environment?
Did the commercial change the mind or did the
cousin who came out of Thanksgiving dinner do
the heavy lifting? I have a feeling the $8 .5
million helped, but the cousin did the work.
I think you're right. That's it for this deep
dive. Thanks for unpacking this with us. We'll
see you next time.