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By David Futrelle
Right-wingers are positively obsessed with lesbian kisses these days. Yesterday I wrote about One Angry Gamer’s meltdown over a fleeting, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it same-sex kiss in the latest Star Wars movie. Meanwhile, over on The Federalist, Lutheran pastor and YouTube personality Hans Fiene is losing it over a cutesy TV commercial running on the Hallmark Channel featuring two lesbians getting hitched. Naturally, it ends with a kiss. A LESBIAN KISS.
The basic thesis of Fiene’s rambling rant, as he warns darkly in the title of his post, is that “Lesbian Ads On The Hallmark Channel Are Just The Beginning.”
The ad in question, for wedding planning site Zola.com, was originally pulled from the channel in response to protests from the unconvincingly named One Million Moms, a front group for SPLC-designated hate group the American Family Association. When this caused an even bigger protest from LGBTQ groups, Hallmark Channel executives reinstated the ad.
This, Fiene insists, is a Really Big Deal:
[E]asy as it is to cry “baby” and “bigot” at those who don’t want gay weddings lauded during commercial breaks, the truth is, like most bursts of the culture wars, this specific battle wasn’t really about the outward issue. The problem for many Christians is not so much the ad itself but what the ad represents.
And what it represents, he says, is an incursion by godless lady sodomites into the holy Christian sanctuary that is the Hallmark Channel.
You may object that the Hallmark Channel is not actually a holy Christian sanctuary at all, but a commercial cable network started by a greeting-card company. Fiene acknowledges this, declaring that
In a theological sense, the Hallmark Channel is not a Christian broadcasting network.
And its movies — even the ones about Christmas — aren’t really Christian because, among other things,
The characters rarely, if ever, pray or worship. The plots never revolve around the heroine saving a church or reading Luke’s nativity account to the flannel-clad, hunky widower’s precocious daughter.
But, he insists,
culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian. The characters don’t take off their clothes, murder anyone, or use profanity.
Ah yes. Very distinct from all those other religions that celebrate naked, potty-mouthed murderers.
In any case, Fiene is convinced that the Hallmark Channel is the last refuge for harried Christian moms who just want to watch wholesome entertainment with their innocent children without having to explain lesbians to them.
[W]hen an ad featuring a lesbian couple airs during a commercial break on the Hallmark Channel, it doesn’t upset you because your fragile little Christian heart can’t handle the image of two women in wedding dresses. It upsets you because the ad indicates that the secular left, led by the LGBT mafia, have discovered your last remaining hideout, planted their flag in the ground, and claimed it as their own.
As Fiene sees it, the evil LGBT mafia has taken over all the other channels on TV, leaving helpless Christian parents terrified to let their kids “near a Thursday evening sitcom for fear they’ll contract HPV via satellite dish.”
But the evil LGBT army won’t be satisfied with merely infecting kids with STIs from space. They want MORE
The same LGBT movement that claimed almost every network and film series you and your children once watched has now claimed virtually every institution in your daily life.
You worry the local public school will indoctrinate your kids. You worry your daughter will lose her shot at a scholarship because the LGBT mobs have bullied the school board into allowing males identifying as females on women’s athletic teams. You’re no longer welcome at your LGBT-compliant local library if you don’t want sexual deviants dancing in front of your children.
That last bit is a reference to Drag Queen Story Hour, a popular attraction at many libraries around the country in which, um, drag queens read stories to kids. It is not, as far as I know, mandatory. Yet.
Now that even the Hallmark Channel has fallen, can Christmas itself remain untainted by the LGBT menace?
“The LGBT Mob Won’t Stop at Hallmark,” Fiene warns, declaring that said mob
probably won’t be content to take away every metaphorical sanctuary we have and then stop short of seizing our literal ones. If they wouldn’t let us celebrate cheesy Hallmark Christmas without celebrating their sin, they won’t let us celebrate actual Jesus Christmas that way either.
I’m not sure that even Fiene knows what he means by that last bit. How exactly would one go about lesbifying Christmas? Does Fiene imagine that all Christian Americans will be required by law to give each other sensible shoes for Christmas to appease the lesbian overlordsladies? That they’ll have to throw out all their Christmas music and replace it with Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls? That the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” be replaced by “O Little Town of Northampton?” That It’s a Wonderful Life will be banned and everyone forced to binge-watch Orange is the New Black instead? That Joseph and Mary will be replaced by Josephine and Mary?
I dunno. I think a lesbified Christmas might be sort of fun.
This Lutheran (me) welcomes lesbifying Christmas and gaying up holidays generally. That creep doesn’t represent all Lutherans or Lutheran theology, and LGBT couples are welcome in my church and if they want, they can have a wedding there.
If they couldn’t it sure as hell wouldn’t BE my church.
I am not sure it count as “positively obsessed”. All of that seem rather negative to me.
Well apparently someone is going to be dawning their GAY apparel this Holliday seasons? eh eh? Okay I’ll let myself out
Side note, I did end up watching a smurf Christmas carol with my nephew a couple days a go and they were singing dawn we now our bright apparel and I was very put off by this because gay no longer means happy in society so smurfs had to change that.
I’d feel at least somewhat more intimidated if my business was contacted by a group named “One Million Angry Gamers”.
@Amy E
Great video, thanks! But having watched far more Hallmark movies than is really sensible (they’re my go-to when I just want to switch off my brain, and I’ve wanted that a lot this year) I have to slightly nitpick the Sue movie. The Hallmark version of that would be that Santa does make Sue a lesbian and it all seems to be going great, but then things would start going wrong – the “perfect” relationship she’d imagined with Sue wouldn’t be so perfect in reality. Eventually the main character would realise that Sue isn’t the right one for her, that it was the only other lesbian at the company – let’s call her Sally from accounts – who was her real true love.
This doesn’t mention Chanukah, but as a Jew I am 100% down with lesbifying Chanukah.
@NautaliaC
I’m wondering myself. Do I need to find the Godmother to take an oath to the mafia family (which I assume has 2 mothers)? I’m both bi and trans*, so presumably that makes me eligible to be a member.
@Lumipuna
Well, at least the angry gamer is honest that there’s only one of him.
I agree with WWTH. They’re courting controversy for the publicity.
These days, I find myself dreading Christmas. I keep thinking about the people I’ve lost – my father, my sister…et cetera, et cetera…I know I’m not alone here. I guess I just have to accept it, as part of getting older.
@Dormousing_it
I think that’s most of it, but I think there’s also a “looking woke” component where they think that progressives will be more likely to use their service if they make it look woke. This might work on less progressive center-left people who are still capitalist and want to support big corporations, but it doesn’t really make me want to pay them (still a big corporation, after all) and I doubt it would motivate the majority of users of this site.
I’m sorry for your losses, and I’m sorry about the suffering the holiday causes for you.
This made me laugh because I imagined characters who never took off their clothes. Like, how would they wash themselves? How would they even change? And if they just put on one outfit, or someone put it on them as infants, would it be made of some fabric that magically expanded as they grew??
(I know it means characters not being naked onscreen. I’m just easily amused.) 😛
Anyway, I read a pretty good article about the issue here.
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
Eh? A blank page? <disables CSS> Still blank? So there must be no content inside the body tag at all???
Worked for me.
Executive summary of article: Hallmark may one day make a holiday movie with gay protagonists; but it will be saccharine rubbish.
(Can you have protagonistS plural; or can there be only one?)
@Surplus
It doesn’t seem to work without JavaScript. Alan’s summary is about all you need to know.
They would poop themselves like The Lord intended, of course. Washing means rejecting the holy grime The Lord gifted to you, you heathen. :p
Also I can second the experience with former friends/acquaintances who leaned conservative and turned out complete reactionaries. Especially since in my experience they all seem to present themselves as moderates while spewing really out there statements.
@ battering lamb
Indeed. The Anglo Saxon chroniclers raised this issue in relation to Chad vikings…
”The Danes, thanks to their habit to comb their hair every day, to bathe every Saturday, to change their garments often, and set off their persons by many such frivolous devices. In this manner, they laid siege to the virtue of the married women, and persuaded the daughters even of the nobles to be their concubines.”
Characters literally never taking off their clothes reminded me of old school Canadian alcohol ads. It used to be that you couldn’t show someone actually drinking the product. So I like to think that in “Beer World” all people do with booze is stand there holding it in glasses or bottles. At some point they pour it into conveniently located drains in the bar floor and ask for another one.
Re: Aaron
Aaron’s story doesn’t sound so far-fetched to me, nor does it sound like it must necessarily come from a place of unexamined bias or lack of critical analysis. People change and grow…or regress and lose their brains. Happens a lot. I’ve run into people I used to know who have gone in directions that surprised me. It’s not that unusual that someone who has a different political position could have been rational and pretty good at defending his ideas (doesn’t mean he was right, just that he was able to take part in a rational discussion or argument like a reasonable human being rather than a zealot), then after five or ten years he apparently went of the deep end of the far right cliff. Not like Aaron’s observations were current.
@Demonhype
The thing is that conservative ideas are fundamentally predicated on denying the humanity of one or (usually) more segments of the population, often in ways that directly lead to the deaths of members of those demographics. Describing them as presenting reasonable arguments for their ideas means agreeing that they have valid positions worthy of reasonable debate by people of goodwill. Speaking as someone who conservatives want to kill, I kinda take issue with that position.
Haven’t you ever heard of never nudes? They shower in cut offs, of course!
@Crip Dyke: Thanks, that was an interesting post. Your reading of Collins’ voting patterns seems at least plausible to me, though ultimately I think the analysis you’re calling for is just one that I’m not competent to make. (I’ll admit that I’m not as informed as I probably should be on Congressional politics/legislation.)
So I can sort of agree with this, in theory at least, though I think it’s an oversimplification. A McConnell-led GOP dominated by Ted Cruzes would still be materially different from a McConnell-led GOP dominated by Collinses, because McConnell doesn’t wield absolute power over the party – the influence is reciprocal to some degree. For example, the mere presence of Collins, Murkowski and McCain affected how McConnell and other Republicans approached and designed their doomed 2017 health care legislation. If you want to call Collins complicit, fair enough, but it seems to me inaccurate to treat any GOP senator as interchangeable.
(Also, I’ll note I wasn’t really trying to mount a defense of Collins – I was just using her reputation as a moderate to describe my understanding of Hans when I knew him. And if you’re a writer rather than (say) a Congresswoman who belongs to one of the two major parties, the nuances of your views do matter, insofar as you primarily influence the world through your arguments rather than your votes.)
@Aaron:
This is probably true. There are theories and rumors about how the GOP actually wanted a few defectors because they knew that taking away health care was going to be a terrible loser at the ballot box, but I have no insider knowledge that this is actually the case, and it’s certainly also true that McConnell may have wanted to end the ACA regardless of the political consequences. So I’m in no position to rebut this statement of yours.
She may not be interchangeable, but McConnell is terrible, and she definitely played her part in enabling McConnell, so the single most consequential vote she cast was still a bad one and I think because of that she deserves no sympathy.
Academic recognition that she’s a bit different than other Repubs? Sure.
Should we oppose her any less than any other Republican Senator? No.
Is she as morally blameworthy as other Republican Senators? Well, I suppose there can be differences of opinion on this, but I think yes.
I wasn’t one to criticize you for inadequate perception, and I have no idea what happened back in the day on those discussion threads. But from my experience there are a lot of people who will change over a few years, and every single one of us engages in communication variance due to pragmatics. Even if Hans was just as regressive and authoritarian back then, he might have engaged in some self-censorship in order to maintain the position he desired within a community that he feared would not fully embrace him if he flew his authoritarian flag high.
So while it’s always possible you missed something back then, it’s in no way certain and I have no way to check your work… so I’m not worried about that at all.
@Crip Dyke: I mostly agree with you, I think.
That’s interesting – I wasn’t aware of these rumors. True or not, it’s a reminder to me that there are ways for McConnell to get what he wants in many different circumstances, which might weaken my argument somewhat, though I don’t think it invalidates it entirely. (After all, even if those rumors are true it’s still the case that McConnell is taking into account the ideological makeup of his senators when deciding how to approach legislation. But I admit that’s a bit of an academic distinction.)
It’s absolutely possible, and something I’d need to think on. But one reason I believe otherwise is that (still keeping things a bit vague here), we were all fairly young back then, Hans included. (We really did know each other quite well.)
@Crip Dyke, Aaron
The thing Collins did that I find to be the most frustrating was being the deciding vote to confirm Kavanaugh. Murkowski at least grew a spine and was able to vote against him.
We could argue that the real decider was Joe Manchin, III, seeing as he was the only Democrat* to support Kavanaugh, but Collins should bear equal blame as any Republican for the Kavanaugh confirmation.
*I am aware that Manchin is a Democrat in name only, and if he were from in any state other than West Virginia he would be considered a Republican.
Terrible. Before you know it they will be demonstrating against Milo Yiannopoulos speaking on campus.
@Dormousing_it
I know what you mean re: Christmas. It hasn’t felt like a time of celebration since my sister died. It didn’t help that it was in December.
@EWM:
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here.