Maryland Mom Launches Petition Following Barilla Exec's Anti-Gay Comments

By Tyler Waldman

A Maryland mother is looking to drain support from an Italian pasta company after its chairman made controversial comments about gays and lesbians.

Beth Allen, a married mother of two in Takoma Park, started a petition on MoveOn.org urging a boycott of Barilla after its chairman, Guido Barilla, said in an interview that the Italian company would not feature gays and lesbians in its ads. As Sunday, the online petition had more than 100,000 signatures.

"Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta," Barilla said, according to a Huffington Post translation of his comments. You can’t always please everyone not to displease anyone. I would not do a commercial with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect toward homosexuals – who have the right to do whatever they want without disturbing others – but because I don’t agree with them, and I think we want to talk to traditional families. The women are crucial in this."

Barilla said in the interview he supports same-sex marriage—currently illegal in Italy—but not adoption by same-sex couples, U-T San Diego reports.

In a statement posted later in English on the company's website, Barilla apologized for what he said were "insensitive comments."

"I understand that they were hurtful and they are not a genuine view of my opinion," he wrote.

But Barilla's company still faces boycotts by advocacy groups in his native Italy (as The Guardian reports) and internationally.

Allen married her partner in January—not long after a law legalizing same-sex marriage in Maryland took effect—and the family cooks pasta dinners nearly weekly, according to a release from MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group.

Barilla has the largest market share of the American pasta market, according to its website.