Gays and Christians-Together at Last

This week I had the privilege of watching Fox's new show "Glee", and found it funny, clever, and original. But I found one aspect of it business-as-usual in Hollywood; it's portrayal of Christians and gays. The "Celibacy Club", as it is called on the show, is a program for teenagers at high-school who want to wait until marriage before having sex. Fair enough. But the girls running the club are straight up hoochies and so far are the main villains of the show. The girls make statements meant to make the idea of celibacy seem ludicrous, while the show's main character makes a dramatic plea to the students in the club urging them that celibacy is "unrealistic" and that they should instead simply be prepared for sex. The male lead is then convinced that indeed, celibacy is ludicrous. I'm not a prude, and would be the last to preach abstinence until marriage (considering I'm a gay Californian, I'm not even afforded that right). Celibacy education (abstinence I would argue would be a better term for the show) has its problems, and undoubtedly some teens will choose to have sex, but those that make this commitment shouldn't be made fun of, or ridiculed for their beliefs. Obviously, it's a lot safer and smarter to avoid sex if you can when you're a teen, so if you are committed enough to go that route, Hollywood has no business making these teens out to be less than human. Just because myself and Hollywood wouldn’t go that route, doesn’t mean we have the only correct position on this issue.

At the same time, the gay character on “Glee” is stereotypically effeminate, fashionable, and serves as the comic relief for the other characters on the show. He is always being thrown into a dumpster and picked on by the other kids. In all fairness, getting picked on in one way or another, is a reality for most of the kids taking part in the glee club. It's just unfortunate that once again, rather than giving us a strong, popular, gay character that breaks the stereotypes that Hollywood provides of the typical gay man, they instead give us the tired, one-dimensional stereotype. Luckily for "Glee" the show has enough other attributes that it is more than worth putting up with this one played-out aspect of the show.

It is ironic though, that as much friction as there often is between the gay community and the Christian community, they are bound together by Hollywood's relentless pursuit of persecution. While some right-wing activists believe that Hollywood serves to make gay culture more mainstream at the expense of traditional family values, and cite movies such as "BrokebackMountain" and "Transamerica" as examples of this "agenda.", the vast majority of gay roles portray gays as feminine, weak, dramatic, and androgynous. It was this portrayal that was one of the reasons my own coming out was so difficult. Not knowing any openly gay men myself, all I knew of what it was to be gay, was from the characters shown on T.V. For years, I held back on accepting who I was in part because portrayals of gay men as wearing women's outfits, talking with a lisp, and having a limp wrist was not something I identified with, nor were they attributes I exhibited. While positive gay characters exist on a few shows and movies now days, they still pale in comparison to the stereotypical "comedy relief" roles, where their flailing wrists, and dramatic personalities lighten the serious mood in any movie or T.V. show. Even if there are no gay characters, language, particularly in movies, is also skewed against gay community. Gay jokes litter most comedies made within the last 20 years, and gratuitous use of the term "faggot" is the norm, and usually attached to a punch line that is supposed to induce a laugh.

As for Christians, what can say? They are usually portrayed as judgemental, ignorant whack-jobs who provide the comic relief, or villainy. They are almost equally disrespected as gay characters, and their views are portrayed as being outside the mainstream.

Apparently, Hollywood, for all its liberal well-meaning tolerance, believes America still finds these caracatures apt and funny. If you’re like me, and believe they’re stereotypes whose time has passed, make your voice heard.

The New Math-Biden Style

So today, Vice-President, and full-time gaff-meister Joe Biden proclaimed that the stimulus package is "doing more, faster, more efficiently, and more effectively than most expected." This in spite of the fact that while the White House promised that the stimulus would keep unemployment under 8% and create more than 750,000 new jobs in the first 200 days of his presidency, more than 200 days in the unemployment rate is at 9.7% and nearly 300,000 jobs were lost in August 2009 alone, with nearly 3 million lost so far in 2009. In the face of this abysmal news, Biden took his "positive stimulus news" one step further in claiming that the economy has likely already created the 750,000 jobs he promised in the first 200 days. The caveat is that they were in the form of "saved" jobs, which conveniently isn't something that's tracked. This is about as credible as Sarah Palin's "I can see Russia from my house" foreign policy experience. Is anyone believing this tripe? Even if you're the Obama Administration, second only in authority to the Holy Trinity, you can't claim jobs that simply might or might not have been lost, into your "jobs created" numbers. If so, God only knows how many "real" jobs Reagan, Clinton, and Bush created. If this is the new math in calculating job creation, we need to go back and recalculate all the "saved" jobs of our nations past administrations to get a fair and proper perspective. Using this new calculation, its possible that President Hoover actually "created" more new jobs than FDR. Perhaps Carter wasn't the disaster we all thought he was. Perhaps he "saved" more jobs than any other president in history. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and say "Jimmy Carter 'saved' and thus created more jobs than any other president in history." I mean, anything's possible right? It's true until it's proven untrue. Welcome folks, to the new math, where a loss equals a gain and what's unprovable is fact. Say it aint so, Joe.

Health Care, the final word (hopefully)-Part Deux

During this whole health care debate, well-meaning liberals have insisted that a public option be part of any health care reform bill that gets voted on by congress. Yet it is the public option part of the bill that will likely be hardest to pass and is the most unpopular aspect of the bill among the American public. Some Democrats seem willing to risk losing the debate, and indeed passage of any health care reform bill in order to make sure a public option is part of the final deal. I find this very odd. After all, isn't the main objective of this bill to simply cover those who don't have insurance? Why should they care if private insurance companies cover them, or the federal government, especially if pushing the federal government-run public option might cost them passage of the bill? Why is the public option non-negotiable?

As I pointed out in Part I, the government has a pretty lousy track record of running public services, and furthermore, there is no need for the federal government to have their own plan in order to keep costs down, and to regulate what the insurance companies are providing for their clients. If there was, the government would be building our cars, and houses, and growing the food we eat. So again, why the insistence on the government-run public option?

This warped logic is reminiscent of another non-negotiable issue for many Liberals-school choice. Liberals have fought for years against giving lower-income parents the ability to send their kids to private schools. They argue that this would somehow harm the public school system, either by possible funding cuts to the public system, or unfair competition. This absolutely makes no sense to me. If you say you are for “the little guy”, if you say you are for helping those less fortunate, shouldn’t you want them to have access to the best schools and the best health care? If public schools are the best, then you shouldn’t worry that people will leave them in droves to go to a private school if they have that option. Public education’s success or failure should speak for itself. Obviously, no one can seriously argue that public schools do a better job of educating our nation’s children than private schools, just as no one can seriously believe that a government-run public option will do a better job running our health care than private insurance companies. It’s also important to point out that private schools do a better job of educating our nation’s children at a lower per capita cost than public schools. And yet, Liberals are fairly united in their belief that there should continue to be a class system when it comes to our schools and health care; a class system where the poor and middle-class are subjected to public schools, and public health care, while the very rich, like Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Streisand, congress, and President Obama, will continue to use private schools and private health insurance. For example, if President Obama truly believed that public schools are as good or better than private, don’t you think he would send his two daughters to one? Instead, he sends his daughters to the private Sidwell Friends School in D.C. that costs $29,000 a year. Shouldn’t he want all Americans to have access to such an exclusive education? Wouldn’t that do more to help level the playing field for inner-city kids, and disadvantaged minority children than any other government social program? The answer is “yes”, but that “yes” is apparently trumped by the desire to maintain a vital voting bloc of the Democratic Party, the poor. The party leadership is obviously smart enough to know it would be impossible to guarantee that that this bloc will remain poor and loyal Democrats if they are given the tools to simply become prosperous Americans.