House of Eratosthenes

My give-a-damn about gay things in general has officially burned out.

If I was the president of a news company, right now I’d be putting out a memorandum that [says] we’re not covering any more gay stories, period. No celebs coming out, no reality-teevee show stars getting in trouble for saying the wrong thing, no movie reviews, no comic book characters having gay weddings, nothing except genuine, hard news. By which I mean, AIDS coming back, overnight. Cover that if it happens, otherwise, it doesn’t qualify as news.

This shit’s gotten seriously out of control. No, I don’t hate gays, I just don’t want to know about it unless it’s something I need to know.

I’m particularly incensed about gay-friendly movies. There are now, in every official way, “gay and lesbian” movie genres; I can’t simply avoid the genres, because the movies are not all in there. Romantic comedies, dramas, even action movies try to be hip and with-it by burning off screen time on gay themes that have nothing to do with the “real” plot. I’m not talking about laughably absurd situations that are really funny, that might happen to depend on homosexuality — like for example, this old show. I’m talking about the gayness itself being the draw, when according to the movie’s billing, the draw was supposed to be something else. The “cool thing to watch” if it’s a “cool” movie, or the funny thing to watch if it’s a funny movie.

When you can’t even make up your mind if you’re laughing-at or laughing-with, you go down that road without me, m’kay? I’m just not that fascinated with homosexuality. I have no reason to be, I’m not gay.

That all having been said: Since this letter is now disappearing off the Internet, and at this point I don’t even have a link I can put up, I thought I should go ahead and get it captured.

Dear A&E,

Thank you for bringing us a show that was family friendly and fun to watch. I greatly appreciated the fact that my Christian family could watch a Christian family on TV as opposed to much of the garbage that is reality TV. Unfortunately, you have done a disservice to Phil Robertson as well as the Christian AND non-Christian fans of Duck Dynasty.

Freedom of speech means that we are all free to speak what we believe. The Supreme Court does restrict some speech. In fact they specifically address such speech that may cause panic or physical injury. The example they give is that someone cannot scream “fire” in a crowded movie theater when there is no fire.

Why, because it would cause a panic and people would get hurt. Did Phil Robertson’s speech meet this criteria set forth by the Supreme Court? No, it did not. The only people who panicked were the A&E executives that decided to pull Phil from the show.

Phil Robertson spoke what he knew to be true according to the Bible. Does that ruffle some peoples feathers because it goes against what they want to do? Yes it does.
The members of GLAAD are free to speak out against Christianity and those that believe in the Bible. How is that speech any different than Phil’s?

Under the U.S. Constitution they both have a right to express their thoughts and opinions. So why is Phil being punished for expressing his opinions? Why are you punishing Phil Robertson for being a Christian? This was not an incident of homophobia or hate speech.

Homosexuality is clearly defined as a sin in the Bible just as other sins are listed. Stating it as a sin does not make someone anti-gay. Phil even stated, “we should love God and each other.”

If GLAAD and the LGBT community expect everyone to be tolerant of their views, opinions, and lifestyle choices, they too must be tolerant of Bible believing Christians, their views, opinions, and lifestyle choices. For A&E to succumb to the pressures of “political correctness” speaks volumes about your true concerns.

However, I would remind you that tolerance is a two-way street.

At this point what is needed is a clarification about your programming and your ant-Christian stance. If you are truly an anti-Christian station, which the move to pull Phil from the show based on his Christian beliefs reveals you to be, please be up front about it. You will most likely lose viewers based on this incident.

However, do not for a minute believe that you are losing viewers because of Phil’s comments. You will lose viewers due to your reaction to his comments.

Therefore, without clarification from A&E that you support Christians and Christian beliefs as much as you support GLAAD and the LGBT community, then “As for Me and My House We Will No Longer Support or Watch A&E.”

Respectfully,

Steven D. Ruffatto

The gayness becomes something we have to talk about, once again, because it rubs up against other things that are more important to us. I would not call those other things “freedom of speech”; the A&E network is under no obligation to preserve, or provide, Mr. Robertson’s rights according to the First Amendment, which when all’s said & done is merely protection from the government, and from nobody else. Without commenting on what may or may not be in the contract between Phil Robertson and A&E, I would say his First Amendment rights have emerged from this unscathed and unmolested, and I wish people would stop describing it that way.

That, however, has to do with the letter of the free speech protection. The spirit of it, however, has certainly been disturbed. After all, if you choose to defend A&E’s decision, whatever argument you use to provide that defense is going to culminate in a continuing obligation to keep on censoring. So there is an issue here, it just doesn’t involve the actual amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It involves the spirit of America. We are a place where the solution to such problems is more speech, and not less speech. That is what has made us unique, and it has been good for us.

Mark Steyn points out:

Duck Dynasty’s Phil Robertson, in his career-detonating interview with GQ, gave a rather thoughtful vernacular exegesis of the Bible’s line on sin, while carefully insisting that he and other Christians are obligated to love all sinners and leave it to the Almighty to adjudicate the competing charms of drunkards, fornicators, and homosexuals.

Nevertheless, GLAAD – “the gatekeepers of politically correct gayness” as the (gay) novelist Bret Easton Ellis sneered — saw its opportunity and seized it. By taking out TV’s leading cable star, it would teach an important lesson pour encourager les autres — that espousing conventional Christian morality, even off-air, is incompatible with American celebrity.

Some of my comrades, who really should know better, wonder why, instead of insisting Robertson be defenestrated, GLAAD wouldn’t rather “start a conversation.” But, if you don’t need to, why bother? Most Christian opponents of gay marriage oppose gay marriage; they don’t oppose the right of gays to advocate it. Yet thug groups such as GLAAD increasingly oppose the right of Christians even to argue their corner. It’s quicker and more effective to silence them.

As Christian bakers ordered to provide wedding cakes for gay nuptials and many others well understand, America’s much-vaunted “freedom of religion” is dwindling down to something you can exercise behind closed doors in the privacy of your own abode or at a specialist venue for those of such tastes for an hour or so on Sunday morning, but when you enter the public square you have to leave your faith back home hanging in the closet.

Does this re-make or re-mold society in the way GLAAD intended? Ann Coulter says:

…[T]o just cite standard morality that has been around for thousands of years and have this angry gay mafia gang up on you and demand your suspension has just gotten out of control. This is not good for the gays.

Not good for the gays. That is a point that keeps getting lost, here, it seems to me. We’ve seen this with black and we’ve seen it with the women: The rank-and-file members of the supposedly oppressed minority who really are just going about their lives and trying to get along, at some point, are left behind by the advocacy organizations who purport to represent them. The “real” people have an incentive to try to minimize conflict with others, whereas the advocacy groups have an incentive to stir it up, aggravate it, keep it going. America’s unique curse lately is that our culture is no longer controlled or guided by the people who actually have to live in it. Once again, we see that the people who have to live with other people, are ready to do so. We’re ready to look past the differences, to minimize them, to work together on other things. But the advocacy groups won’t allow us to.

They smell blood on the water, and they want some flesh. The “gay sharks” are particularly vicious, because the black-sharks have already had their frenzy, along with the fem-sharks. One example after another can be found of such-and-such a guy…usually a guy…who had a promising career, but said the wrong thing and his head ended up on a pike. But where are the examples to be made by the gay lobby? They need more kills. That is the truth of the matter. That’s what is at the heart of it, and we’re not allowed to discuss it openly. There haven’t yet been enough martyrs for the gay cause, and there need to be some because otherwise it has not yet achieved stature.

Again: It isn’t the gay individuals saying so. It’s the organized advocacy groups. That’s the way it always is; the people just want to move past it and get on with their lives like anyone else, the groups insist on wallowing in victimology and forcing everyone else to do the same.

I don’t think we should continue to pretend any of this has to do with “tolerance.” It doesn’t, and nobody who’s been paying attention thinks it does. It’s about blood. Blood and predators, executors and martyrs, masters and slaves, anointed and damned.

The real irony is, if Phil Robertson had more power, and GLAAD and the A&E executives had less — heck, if Robertson was the dictator over all of us — there’d be more tolerance. In all likelihood, we’d have a happy situation in which there’d be a place for everybody. GLAAD is putting a lot of effort into avoiding exactly that situation. They want to make new pariahs, to shove targeted people into pariah status. They seek to establish, and preserve, a caste system. We’re supposed to pretend they want an egalitarian society, but they want the exact opposite of that.

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