One Million Moms Slams ‘Parents’ Magazine for Featuring Gay Dads on the Cover

For the first time in its 92-year history, Parents magazine is featuring openly gay parents on its cover. Fitness mogul Shaun Thompson, his husband and business partner Scott Blokker, and their one-year-old twins Silas and Sander are shown casually dressed and smiling. It’s a completely innocuous picture on the cover of a magazine not known for courting controversy, but that’s not how conservative groups like One Million Moms see it.

The group, an offshoot of Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group the American Family Association, describes its goal as stopping “the exploitation of our children, especially by the entertainment media.” In their minds, anything beyond Leave It To Beaver is a threat to kids, and positive portrayals of homosexuality are a popular target.

The group’s past targets include JCPenney for hiring Ellen DeGeneres as a spokeswoman, the CBS show Person of Interest for introducing a married lesbian couple, and Geico for a commercial that they somehow thought was encouraging teens to experiment with bestiality.

The group calls itself “the most powerful tool you have to stand against the immorality, violence, vulgarity, and profanity the entertainment media is throwing at your children.” Most of its actions are designed to inflict public pressure on companies that create or somehow support content they deem offensive.

In this case, One Million Moms launched a petition campaign against the magazine, which to date has just over 10,000 signers or about one percent of what you’d expect a group with a million dedicated members to have. The short statement expressions disappointment that Parents “would use their magazine to promote same-sex parenting” and offensive “to me and my family that the publication would glorify this pro-homosexual lifestyle.”

Thankfully, there are plenty of positive reactions as well. On Instagram, for every Bible-quoting bigoted statement, there are multiple supportive comments from people who see the cover for what it is: an accurate portrayal of a loving family.