I am so tired of reading news releases like this.
The group, One Million Moms, has been attacking the
television comedy The Real O’Neals
since before the show even aired its pilot episode. The social activists, on their website,
loudly declare:
"The Real O'Neals" mocks
Christianity and insults Catholicism. 1MM recognizes this show ridicules people
of faith, and Christians across America are offended by it.
You can read
more about the group’s most recent attack and attempt to bombard sponsors
of the show by clicking here.
Here’s the thing that certain people don’t understand: Just because you don’t agree with a thing and
just because you find it offensive doesn’t mean everyone needs to agree with
you and find the thing offensive. I know
this might come as a surprise to some members of the Church considering you’re
still operating under the faulty impression that the Church is the center of
the universe, but it’s not. It hasn’t
been since the collapse of colonialism and the end of Christendom. Which, by the way, as a Christian, I find to
be a most happy circumstance because now the majority of people connected to
the Church are connected because they feel called to be and not because someone
with power and authority is forcing them to be.
It’s the same thing as this
article about the Benham brothers in North Carolina claiming that
““the newest fruit of the vine of
Sodom is the sexual revolution — and it’s poisoning our land. It has nearly
taken over everything and is forcing itself on everyone.”
Again, this might shock some people, but a minority group
struggling for equality has been labeled as “the end of civilization as we know
it” since the very beginning. Giving
women the vote was going to destroy our country. Civil rights was going to destroy our
country. Freeing slaves was going to
destroy our country. Letting the Irish
into the United States was going to destroy our country.
Do you know what’s going to destroy the United States? Ignorance.
And it seems that anti-LGBT groups have a surplus of ignorance.
Look at the press release from One Million Moms listing the
complaints over The Real O’Neals.
·
Brothers view p-rn on laptop. Gay p-rn made to
appear normal and acceptable. Comments between brothers and between father and
sons show no form of guilt in watching p-rn. Jokes and other references such as
p-rnado and p-rnward are made.
·
Gay character and his brother observe that
"10 percent of the population is gay," and suggest that most of those
who object to gay p-rn are h-mophobic. In reality, The Centers for Disease
Control reports that 1.6 percent of the population is h-mos-xual. That is a far
cry from 10 percent, but since a big part of the show's agenda is to normalize
h-mos-xuality along with other sins, it makes sense for the show to lie.
·
Student at Catholic school holds up middle finger,
which is pixelated.
·
The daughter skips church, doubts God,
disrespects priest as she verbally backs him into a corner, and he (the head of
their church) fails at answering her questions.
·
ABC network refers to this highly dysfunctional
family as "the perfect Irish-Catholic family."
·
Foul language (purposely uses every word
imaginable).
·
One of the show's producers is anti-Christian
b-got Dan Savage, and the show is said to be loosely based on his life.
I watched this episode (found here on Hulu) and thought it
was one of the best. I recognize that’s
just my opinion. So let’s look at 1MM’s
points and direct them to some facts.
1.
According to a survey
conducted in Canada (and remember a survey is self-report and will always
skew conservative in its results as people doing the self-report will never be
completely honest—especially a survey of kids), 40% of boys between grades 4 and
11 frequently look at porn online. Now,
I’m not going to argue the pro’s and con’s of the porn industry. I have an opinion and I can share that
opinion elsewhere. It’s enough to say
that this is the REALITY of the world we are living in being reflected back to
us on our television screens. Gone are
the days of Donna Reed wearing pearls and cleaning the house and cooking dinner
with a smile on her face and a song in heart while women at home knew a
completely different story.
Television—the best television and the most compelling television—holds
life up in front of us to be ironic, comedic, or to make a statement. I would like to think in this scene The Real
O’Neals is doing all three.
And, seriously, if you can’t even
be adult enough to write the word “porn” or “homophobic” or even “bigot”
without leaving out a letter, maybe you shouldn’t be allowed access to the
internet.
2.
I actually agree with 1MM on their point
regarding “10% of the world’s population is gay.” 1MM cites this report from the Centers forDisease Control that uses data collected in a separate study in 2013. This report does indicate that 1.6% of the
respondents to the survey identified as gay.
The problem is, of course, two-fold:
The report relies on self-report data from a survey taken of adults ages
18 and over, the majority of which are from a time in which they could not be
LGBT and were forced into a non-LGBT lifestyle (something I’m most familiar
with). The second problem is that the
report is using collateral data from a completely different study. What this means is that the method of
collection for the data leading to the CDC report was not designed to procure
accurate data for a report of this nature.
A more appropriate report, doing
what it was designed to do and reporting a much more accurate picture of the
LGBT demographic, would be this one.
Again, self-report is problematic but it is the only way we can
determine these things. But this
survey reports that 52% of school kids between the ages of 13 and 20 identify
as LGBT.
Or here’s another report I used
in this post on suicide in the LGBT community. The study was conducted by the National
School Climate Survey in 2013 and of the 8,000 students surveyed randomly,
60% identified as LGBT. The survey then
moves forward to highlight the struggles that LGBT people face because groups
like 1MM want to ignore the REALITY that LGBT people exist, are normal, and
have every right to see LGBT people on TV whether 1MM’s think its “decent” or
not.
3.
OMG! A
student in a Catholic school flipped the bird and the nuns didn’t come running
with their rulers!
4.
I want to take a minute and talk about “doubting
God.” EVERYONE doubts God. The opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. Faith is belief in what is unseen. Certainty is created by empirical
evidence.
This is
again the problem with Christians who don’t know what it actually is
they’re reading. One of the Greek words
translated as “doubt” is diakrinō but
doubt (as in “disbelief”) is not what the word means. It means to oppose. So in Matthew 21.21 when Jesus says, “Jesus
answered them, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only
will you do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this
mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will be done.” The word
“doubt” there? Yeah, that means “oppose”
or “make a distinction against.”
Doubt gets a bad rep from Bible
thumping Christians. If you’re not
doubting your faith, you’re not growing your faith. If you’re so certain your faith is right,
then your faith is stagnant and you’re not growing. You’ve got a system, not a faith.
5.
“The perfect Irish family?” Yeah, I don’t think 1MM knows how comedy
works.
6.
Foul language “purposefully uses every word
imaginable?” I don’t know. I can imagine quite a few that haven’t been
said on the show. A lot of them people
can hear at 1MM rallies outside of Planned Parenthood clinics.
So, here it is in a nutshell, One Million Moms and Benham
Brothers and anyone else who thinks that a majority group can be oppressed by a
minority group in its fight for equality:
You can have your ill-informed, ill-formed opinions but the rest of the
world is not required to adopt your line of thinking no matter how “God-inspired”
you think your opinion is.
Are you listening, Kim Davis? Or is the hypocrisy in your life too loud?
Feel free to hold onto your outdated, outmoded, consistently
proven as implausible and inaccurate convictions in order to combat the tides
of change that are about to overtake you.
But remember, One Million Moms, if your name is any indication of your
true numbers and each of you is the mother of say two children (on average),
that’s two million kids. That means,
according to the survey I cited about, 1,040,000 of your kids are LGBT. You are NOT doing them any favors with your
rhetoric and your campaign to remove a role model—albeit a comedic one—from
their lives.
Seriously. It’s time
to get real.
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