Fair or too far? Barilla Pasta CEO Refuses To Feature Gay Families In Commercials Member of the LGBT community are in an uproar and some are even calling for a boycott after Barilla Pasta CEO Guido Barilla recently spoke out against featuring a gay family in his television commercials. via Gawker Guido Barilla, head of the world’s biggest pasta brand, went on an anti-gay rant on Italian radio yesterday, proclaiming that he would never OK a commercial depicting a gay family and that if gays don’t like his views “they can eat another pasta.” Barilla pasta is famous in part because of its TV ads, which portray a traditional Italian family living in the quaint Italian countryside—tagline: “Where there’s Barilla, there’s home.” Asked if he’d ever consider replacing that traditional family with a gay one, Barilla scoffed: “I would never do (a commercial) with a h*m*se*ual family, not for lack of respect but because we don’t agree with them. Ours is a classic family where the woman plays a fundamental role,” Barilla, 55, said in an interview with Radio 24 on Wednesday. In the interview, Barilla said he opposed adoption by gay parents, but was in favour of allowing gay marriage, which is not legal in Italy. … If gays “like our pasta and our advertising, they’ll eat our pasta, if they don’t like it then they will not eat it and they will eat another brand,” he said. Do you think companies should be required to incorporate LGBT families into their advertising as more gay-friendly laws are passed in the United States? Continue reading →
