Doritos threatened with boycott for ad with LGBTQ families
Religious Jews were outraged by Hebrew-language commercial's inclusion of families headed by same-sex couples.
Doritos is facing calls for a boycott of its products from conservative religious Israeli Jews after the chip company released an ad featuring diverse families, including some families headed by same-sex couples.
The ad was posted last week on Doritos’ Hebrew-language social media accounts ahead of Family Day, or or Yom HaMishpacha, which was marked on Tuesday, Feb. 1. The holiday originally started as Mother’s Day, but was later expanded to honor all parents.
The Doritos ad shows various types of families, as a narrator says family is not something one chooses, reports the Times of Israel.
“But there are some families that do choose to be families. There are families created by the complex reality,” the narrator says, as the commercial shows what appears to be a lesbian couple with two babies and a young girl, and another pair of women holding a photo of another woman.
The commercial continues showing other types of families, including a mixed religious-secular couple and their kids, and a single father with his two children.
“There are families that traveled to the other side of the world on the path to [becoming a] family,” the narrator continues, as the screen shows a gay male couple with a toddler. “There are many families and they are all special and even if it takes courage to dare in all choices, all families deserve to be families.”
Social and religious conservatives were outraged by the ad.
“For the sake of the mental and spiritual health of the coming generations, we must boycott Doritos, which is trying to influence the natural family group by advertising its products,” tweeted Aryeh King, a far-right deputy mayor of Jerusalem.
A rabbi in the West Bank settlement of Efrat also urged a boycott of the company, urging his followers not to associate with “evil.”
“It is forbidden to recognize those who live like this as a family,” Rabbi Baruch Efrati said.
Emanuel Shilo, the editor of he religious Zionist Hebrew language weekly newspaper B’Sheva declared that snack manufacturers like Doritos should weigh in on “controversial moral issues.”
“Judaism only recognizes a family with a man and a woman. I won’t get involved in the life of someone who chooses to live differently, but I won’t give my money to a company that uses it to harm my values, Jewish family values,” Shilo tweeted.
But despite pushback from religious and Orthodox critics, Doritos refused to remove or change the ad.
“We respect all views, beliefs and the diversity of Israeli society and have no intention to harm any group,” the company said in a statement.
Watch the Hebrew-language version of the ad below:
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