Please bear with me folks, I have no idea where to post this but I think many of you who read broadsheet regularly may care about this issue. I have great respect for this website, which is why I was extremely disappointed to see the daypass add I saw this evening.

The following is a letter I sent to salon.com:

I am writing to protest your choice of sponsor in the California Healthy Marriages Coalition. This organization emphasizes the importance of marriage in a state where same-sex couples are constitutionally barred from the institution. The website features images only of opposite-sex couples. It also features only images of "race-matched" couples, choosing not to represent inter-racial marriages.

When organizations use marriage as a fundamental part of the definition of a healthy family, then explicitly or implicitly exclude interracial and same-sex couples from that definition, they help to further the notion in our society that interracial and same-sex families (and homosexual and bi-sexual people) are flawed and unworthy.

Though bearing tacit witness to such a narrow idea of family is bad enough, I believe it likely that this organization's purpose is to do more than just ignore us. It is comprised of a number of faith-based coalitions that incorporate a conservative Christian theology with their counseling services. And despite the fact that there is substantial psychological literature on marriage and family counseling published in peer-reviewed, scientific journals, in its mission statement CHMC includes multiple references to Heritage Foundation studies (and an external link to their website). The Heritage Foundation is: "a research and educational institute - a think tank - whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense." It is an antiabortion, so-called "family values" think-tank.

What kind of advertising is not okay for Salon.com? Where do you draw the line?

Will send.

Let's not get too tsk tsk-y about beauty. Beauty is a good thing. Every once in a while our Puritan roots rear up and we start having trouble seeing the difference between a reasonable and joyful expenditure on something with aesthetic value and a hollow narcissistic excess. Not all wedding dresses and not all weddings, even some of the ones that cost a bit of dough, are the latter. There are certainly ethical issues (e.g. who made the dress and how much were they paid?), and practical ones (e.g. is this the fruit of your own labor, a loving gift from family, a resented gift from family, or something that's going to put you into major debt?), but there are ways to navigate those potentially troubled waters and still do something beautiful.

Making beautiful pictures that you will put on your wall and look at every day is a much better use of the money you spent on the dress than keeping the thing in a closet for eternity. I agree that donating the dress is an even better idea. But why begrudge people for making some unique and interesting photography out of something they had already purchased anyway? For goodness sakes, we are always bemoaning how dull and formulaic our wedding traditions are. Here's something that is original and vital, at least for now. Hooray for that! It's aesthetic recycling, if you ask me, and I'm all for it.

Sure there are some good individual conservative Christians, and some conservative Christian faith-based organizations that do good work. Some of the organizations from the CHMC are probably doing good work. It's a shame they seem to only be doing that work for married same-sex couples. I'd love to find out that this organization has just chosen an unfortunate name (could have been CA healthy /families/ coalition), but I highly doubt it. The quotes from the Heritage Foundation were the clincher for me.

To equate accepting or not accepting advertising sponsorship with allowing or not allowing debate seems to me to be somewhat simplistic. Advertising is not debate, and it does very little to help us understand one another. I am very happy to talk with conservatives both on these forums and elsewhere. However, I find it surprising that Salon, which has some pretty clear editorial perspectives, would be accepting sponsorship dollars from them. And regardless of what sponsors Salon will and will not choose to accept, for me the point is to speak up about it, because the fundamental problem with the CHMC is that it acts in its adds and on its website like certain people in our culture either don't exist or are irrelevant, and for me it is important to make some noise about that.