An older man wakes in the morning, does his push-ups, brushes his teeth and gets dressed.
He puts on a military uniform and looks at the photographs of his days as a young man in football and service uniforms, sitting on his dresser.
The screen then shows a single word, "freedom," which momentarily seems to be a patriotic ad, but it is then followed by a shot of the man's bed -- with another man of his age in it. The last screen shows the remainder of the sentence, "to differ."
This commercial shows an effective, non-threatening portrait of a male couple that is not stereotyped and older, in favor of its support of gays in the military.
ACLU-WA Executive Director Kathleen Taylor explains that "the ads are aimed at people in their 20s and 30s who share the beliefs and values of the ACLU but are not members – partly because they do not know much about what we stand for. The campaign intends to show how the ACLU relates to their lives and issues they care about," she said. "The language is intentionally hipper than usual for the ACLU," she added.
Despite the national scope of the subject and the ACLU organization, this commercial aired only in Washington State.
