In that case, there’s hardly a more effective way for you to show your audience that your family is just as real as anyone else’s than to hold your infant son while he drives his toy truck across your face and reminds everyone that you’ve gone on a little too long by whispering “I want daddy to stop talking.”

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When Weddings Unveiled magazine balked at running photographer Anne Almasy‘s ad because it featured a photo of a same-sex couple on their wedding day, Almasy responded with a few reliable PR strategies: Tugging at heartstrings, working in the name of love and tossing in a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. quote for good measure are pretty good strategies for gaining the support of like-minded people.

Almasy chose the adjacent picture for her ad because “…to me, it says love. It says home. It says joy.”

But it seems when the editors at Weddings Unveiled looked at the picture, they saw less love and joy, and more of a potential PR problem. One of the magazine’s editors sent Almasy the following comment:

“Is there possibly another photograph you’d like to use in your ad? We just don’t feel comfortable publishing an ad featuring a same-sex couple. These aren’t our personal beliefs, of course, but, you know…”

Taken aback, Almasy said of her work, “I don’t shoot gay weddings or straight weddings, Christian weddings or Jewish weddings, good weddings or bad weddings. I photograph PEOPLE on their wedding day.” But she didn’t stop there; she penned an open letter to WU, expressing her disappointment and defending her work. It read, in part:

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Culliver then issued what may be the least effective damage control statement ever, saying that “The derogatory comments I made yesterday were a reflection of thoughts in my head, but they are not how I feel.”

You’d think the clip below–recorded as part of Dan Savage‘s “It Gets Better” anti-bullying PSA campaign for gay and lesbian youth–might help nip that problem in the bud, right?

No such luck: yesterday two of the very players who appear in the video denied ever making it.

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This would be a major change for an organization that built its reputation on traditionalism. And it would certainly prove controversial within the larger scouting community, which was rocked by the BSA’s poor response to its own child abuse scandal in 2012.

It would also go against recent developments. The BSA re-affirmed the ban last July, and just this weekend a local Cub Scouts pack revised gay-friendly language on its website under pressure from the larger organization.

The theory for this new approach holds that certain local factions would be free to continue banning gay members, thereby giving families the power to choose the groups that best represent their belief sets. While many continue to protest the BSA’s exclusion of openly gay individuals, we have no doubt that some longtime supporters would not be happy to see the ban end (which explains leaders’ clear desire for a “flexible” solution).

Public opinion has shifted decisively in favor of gay marriage, and our country now has more openly gay people in positions of power than ever before. The Boy Scouts will have to change at some point unless the group wants its membership to decline dramatically. But how can the organization most effectively adjust to this societal shift?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

These “medical” professionals claim to be able to relieve individuals suffering from unwanted bouts of homosexuality; they’ve received a bit of attention from the political press over the past few years, and they’re about to face the biggest PR challenge in the history of their (relatively new) practice.

The most interesting part about this case is that it concerns the Orthodox Jewish community, most of whose members believe homosexuality to be forbidden by the Torah. Four young men whose rabbis urged them to seek reparative therapy with a group called JONAH (Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing) are now suing the organization for fraud with the backing of the Southern Poverty and Law Center, a non-profit known for defending those with contradictory opinions both popular and unpopular.

The defendants’ lawsuit states that the group, whose director believes that “homosexuality is a learned behavior, which can be unlearned”, falsely advertised its services—and some of the practices involved in the JONAH “solution” are unconventional, to say the least.

One thing is clear: the immediate future presents a series of uphill battles for gay cure therapists.

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Today, Freeman moves boldly into the social advocacy sphere, applying his signature cadence to a brief TV spot titled “Dawn of a New Day for Marriage Equality”. The purpose of the commercial, produced by the non-profit Human Rights Campaign, is to celebrate the movement’s election day victories (in which gay marriage won popular approval in three states for the first time in this country) while simultaneously preparing allies for the legal and political struggles that still lie ahead.

One could spend hours parsing the messages of this ad, and we’re sure someone will question the clear link drawn between the Civil Rights Movement and the current push for marriage equality (because someone always has to do that). Still, we find it to be a fairly compelling piece of political PR; Mr. Freeman certainly makes the HRC’s case feel more…epic than a man with less powerful vocal chords possibly could.

What do we think of this spot? What influence do Freeman’s voice and celebrity status have on the power of the underlying campaign?

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Election 2012 included several significant gay rights gains: Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay American Senator, California’s Mark Takano became the first openly gay person of color to serve in congress, Iowa voters chose to retain the judge who cast the deciding vote in approving gay marriage and, most importantly, voters in four states chose to either legalize gay marriage or reject constitutional amendments forbidding it.

It was a proud, hard-earned moment for millions of gay Americans–but how will it affect the LGBT PR industry and related campaigns?

Quite a few existing firms explicitly cater to gay audiences–and we’ve witnessed an increase in the use of obviously gay figures in advertising and PR campaigns. Here, for example, is a recent groundbreaking ad created by Brand USA to promote United States tourism to overseas audiences that features a gay couple:

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