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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.
My folks had my cousin over for a Christmas dinner on Sunday and I happened to be there too. My cousin mentioned that she had unfollowed one of her more distant fundamentalist relations after she posted on Facebook about the lesbian Hallmark ad and how terrible it was. No way my very outspoken cousin would countenance that (nor I for that matter).
It’s remarkable just how little outrage nuggets get promulgated in the right-wing spheres. It’s like within an instant, every reactionary d-bag knows about it and spams their social media feeds about it.
@Katamount
I unfollowed my great-uncle when he started reposting memes that were created by Russian bots. It’s like they have some sort of groupthink that unites bigots across ages. Teenage shitposters and 70-year-old racist grandfathers post the same memes.
@Aaron
Call me a cynic, but it’s also possible he realized Susan Collins Republican Lite doesn’t generate as many clicks as bizarre outrage porn. Wouldn’t be the first time we’ve seen folks court radicals because they’re easier to cash in on.
@Drungarios – This is pretty much one of the main vectors of radicalization.
Not-really-radical public asshole sees public support/enthusiasm for them stagnate/decline -> asshole notices radicals from his general social/political neck of the woods are both highly motivated and frustrated that their ideas don’t get more mainstream recognition -> asshole decides to court radicals to both broaden and energize their base -> radicals’ ideas, now backed by someone with some mainstream pull, starts entering mainstream -> flush with success, and seeing public opinion/perception shift, asshole themself starts radicalizing as their brain attempts to rationalize their actions in a “positive” way -> cycle repeats, with more and more radical ideas being pushed into mainstream and original now-really-fucking-radical public asshole becoming ever more radical.
Re the thing about whether people who are trumpsters now were always that way:
I don’t think it came out of nothing, but at the same time, there are all those gazillion Facebook memes paid for by dark money. You know, the ones that say that hoards of Mexcan rapists are on their way to steal your job. The current batch never make scientific arguments against the climate emergency, they just say that Greta thunberg is a terrible, terible person. Well whoever paid for those ads must think they change minds.
My best guest is that these people always had a cruel and bigoted streak, but somebody’s nurtured it very carefully and they really are different from 10 years ago.
I think that ads like this make men feel attacked, because there are women who won’t be into them. I think the problem here is the mentality that men deserve to have women (or vice versa) that’s perpetuated; being single especially in later adult years is made to look bad and I guess people internalize it. For instance, I briefly saw something about Lauren Southern complaining about why she’s not marrying or being in a longer term relationship in her twenties, as if it were a bad thing.
In cases not involving relationships and/or sex, then I’m less certain, but I still think people would see this as an affront to men for some reason, I think down to an aspect of being seen as worthy as being highly attractive in a heterosexual manner.
@Sheila Crosby – I’d say your guess is pretty likely. The last 20 or so years, in part thanks to the Internet, have seen a rise in the normalization of asshole thought and behavior, so people with only mild asshole tendencies previously gradually became bigger assholes through more and more exposure to assholishness, some of it much worse than theirs.
I think that people will start to simply dehumanize women more through stuff like the Bible and evolutionary psychology.
I went to a service (had to, with my parents), and heard a boy say that it was Eve’s fault for the original sin, even though the priest giving the sermon insisted both were at fault. I would have been almost as vulnerable to such an interpretation of the relationship between men and women.
Such assholes can cite something like Genesis 2:18 for this, essentially hammering the point home that if a woman cannot or won’t help a man, that she’s worthless, even if the man is harming her.
I don’t know how we’re going to resolve this when the comments section of the article I linked had a small argument that to me, seemed to go nowhere.
@WWTH:
There are dozen of us! Dozens!
@Paireon
It’s a matter of degree more than kind; the Cult of Asshole has always been fairly pervasive in American life, but moreso since the 80s and even more than that since the turn of the century
I live in Northampton. It’s pretty awesome, & totally gay.
@Dalillama – True, the rise to (further) prominence of said Cult did start in the 80’s, but as you said the turn of the century saw a further acceleration of its rise, which is IMO likely due to the normalization effect I mentioned; I’d say both degree and kind had a pretty strong role in this, as different flavors of assholism began cross-contaminating each other.
People like Hans Fiene, want this to be the gays forcing their “sin” on the American public so badly. They can’t bring themselves to admit that this is what the American Mainstream has come to expect, not to mention want to see. They can’t bring themselves to accept that, because they can’t bring themselves to come to terms with how badly they have lost.
The fact of the matter is people attracted to the same sex have always existed and will always exist, short of the some world wide fascist distopia where the state is able to screen every single mother before they give birth and birth and force her to either have an abortion if they are able to detect “gay genes”
“Naturally, it ends with a kiss. A LESBIAN KISS.”
Hot. More please.
I will literally steer my heterosexual and homosexual friends to that damn site every time any of them starts dreaming about marriage.