Should a whole State be branded as homosexual?

Misleading advertising, it seems to me:

"A recent controversy in South Carolina over an ad and promotional campaign based around the message "South Carolina is so gay" has brought up questions related to the best ways to target this audience in a progressive media environment tethered to changing cultural morays. The campaign included ads posted around London tied to the city's Gay Pride Week celebrations, reports MSNBC.com. After the political blog "The Palmetto Scoop" uncovered the ads, Republican state Sen. David Thomas said in a statement, "South Carolinians will be irate when they learn their hard earned tax dollars are being spent to advertise our state as 'so gay.'" But the travel agency that commissioned the ads stands by its message: Andrew Roberts, chief executive of the company, Amro Worldwide, said the ads were intended to "send a clear message to everyone who sees this campaign that it is long past time that 'so gay' should be used as a negative phrase of disapproval," reports MSNBC.com.

Surprisingly, South Carolina's top state tourism officials said they were not aware of the campaign. However, they issued a statement saying the campaign "sends a powerful positive message," MSNBC.com reports. "For our gay visitors, it is actually quite wonderful for them to discover just how much South Carolina has to offer-from stunning plantation homes to miles of wide sandy beaches," the statement said.

But some experts disagree. For example, MSNBC.com reports that Oran Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative activist group in Columbia, South Carolina said in an interview, "I think with today's economy, we have to be really smart with our tourism dollars, and South Carolina's market, very clearly, is the family-friendly market. So if we want to spend our dollars in a way that's wise, we need to go after our market, and our market is families."

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