Coke Commercial Outrages Conservatives With Multi-Lingual ‘America The Beautiful’
A Coke commercial that seemed to present one of the more inspiring moments in Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast has instead set off an explosion of outrage among conservative media commentators as well as social media participants, including calls to boycott Coca Cola, and some social media messages that took a disturbingly ugly turn.
What was so offensive to conservative sensibilities? The Coke commercial, entitled “It’s Beautiful,” featured a rendition of the song “America the Beautiful” sung in several different languages in addition to English.
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck objected to the Coke commercial, saying that presenting the song “America The Beautiful” sung in a variety of languages was an attempt to cause political divisions.
“Why did you need that to divide us politically?,” Beck asked on his show. “Because that’s all this ad is. It’s in your face, and if you don’t like it, if you’re offended by it, you’re a racist. If you do like it, you’re for immigration. You’re for progress.”
Fox News contributor Todd Starnes was also offended by the message of the advertisement, in a series of tweets in which be boasted of his lack of ability to speak any language other than English.
Couldn’t make out that song they were singing. I only speak English.
— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
Michael Patrick Leahy on the conservative web site Breitbart.com blasted Coca Cola executives for believing, “it was a good idea to run a 60 second Super Bowl ad featuring children singing “America the Beautiful” — a deeply Christian patriotic anthem whose theme is unity — in several foreign languages.”
Why demonstrating that people who speak other languages than English can find America to be beautiful is evidence of disunity rather than the opposite went unexplained.
Leahy also criticized the Coke commercial for depicting, among its many images of people from diverse cultural backgrounds, a gay couple.
The criticism seems puzzling in light of the fact that the author of the lyrics to “America The Beautiful,” Katharine Lee Bates, was a lesbian who lived in a committed relationship with her partner Katherine Coman for 25 years until Coman died of cancer in 1915.
Bates was a poet who penned “America The Beautiful” in 1893. Many of her other works were love poems dedicated to Coman.
The remarks of conservative pundits were relatively restrained compared to some of the comments that surfaced on Twitter.
But some of the worst including @tylerwyckoff24 complaining that the Coke commercial featured the song sung in “the terrorist’s language,” and @EIJungleCat declaring that “Mexicans, terrorists, jews and n****** are not American” resulted in such a fierce backlash that the Twitter accounts where they were posted have since been deleted.
At least one conservative pundit, Erick Erickson of the Red State web site and a Fox News commentator, found the whole affair baffling.
People were really upset about the Coke advertisement? Seriously?
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) February 3, 2014
Watch the Coke commercial for yourself below. What do you think? Are you outraged?
