Lt. Jack McCain, a Navy pilot and son of Sen. John McCain, demonstrated last weekend that the best way to combat hatred is through love.

It all started when clothing retailer Old Navy posted an ad on Twitter featuring a fashionable interracial family. The brand was quickly barraged with racist diatribes and accusations of ‘white genocide’ from social media users.

McCain doesn’t normally get involved with politics–his father has that covered for the entire family–but this was personal. In 2013, McCain wed Air Force Reserve Capt. Renee Swift, a black woman. To show his solidarity with Old Navy, McCain posted a picture of himself and his wife in military uniform on Monday.

“To the people upset about the #OldNavy ‘Scandal’ of an a picture of a mixed race marriage, eat it.”

He followed up with this photo from his wedding day.

And she did too.

McCain told the Navy Times that he didn’t expect his tweets to go viral or inspire other mixed race couples to share their own photos. Even so, he is proud that he took a stand.

“I did not intend for this level of exposure. Mostly, I wanted to take a principled stand on an issue that shouldn’t be one in the first place,” McCain said in an email. “If there is one result I could hope for out of all of this furor, it would be helping to ensure that intolerance has no place in service, or in our national discourse.”

The MH60 Seahawk pilot graduated from the Naval Academy in 2009. He has served as a Navy pilot since 2011, and is currently working towards his Master’s degree at Georgetown University.

The landmark court case Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage legal in 1967. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white and black biracial Americans more than doubled between 2000 and 2010. During that time, the number of Asian and white biracial Americans rose by 87 percent.