viz.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music.  This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship.  The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees.  After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.”  Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates.  Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner?  Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.