Gay car site gets unwanted "Yes on 8" ads

Gaywheels.com, a website aimed at gay car buyers, said the ad space on its home page was "hijacked" today by supporters of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative that would ban same-sex marriage in California.

Joe LaMuraglia, publisher of the New Jersey-based website, was in Tennessee this afternoon when he found out that folks in California who went to www.gaywheels.com were being greeted with a page festooned with "Yes on 8" ads.

"We are very upset about this and apologize to any site visitors from the state of California that might have been offended by the ads," LaMuraglia said in a statement posted on the site.

"They in no way reflect our political beliefs and for the record are diametrically opposed to our value system."

How the ads got on the site is a bit of a mystery.

The ads apparently were placed through Google's AdSense service, which LaMuraglia uses to generate ad revenue for Gaywheels.com. LaMuraglia said it was his understanding that his agreement with Google allowed him to block all political advertising from his site and until today, no political ads had ever appeared on Gaywheels.com.

Google has been a bit opaque in explaining how the Proposition 8 ad got on the site, he said. And even after LaMuraglia demanded that the ads be removed, a couple of hours passed before they were gone.

A spokeswoman for the pro-Proposition 8 campaign denied targeting its ads at Gaywheels.com.