Hallmark movies: we all know them and however you feel about them, there’s no denying that they’re a staple of Christmastime in America but they only seem to focus on straight people and never any LGBT couples. Bill Abbott, Hallmark Channel’s CEO said recently that he would be okay with having a gay-themed Christmas movie on Hallmark but has no immediate plans to produce one. However, just mentioning that he would be open to the idea was enough to make Evangelical website LifeSiteNews create a petition to shut down the potential production of such a movie, according to Newsweek.
Hallmark is set to release thirty-six Christmas-themed movies this December, yet none of them contain any major LGBT content. Typical of these Evangelicals, LifeSiteNews, in their petition, warned Hallmark against producing LGBT-themed movies, saying that the company is “on the verge of making a terrible moral decision” and that if Hallmark makes such a movie, LGBT activists will never be happy because they will want Hallmark to push “more and more aberrant views and characters.” I’m honestly not even bothered by this argument that showing gay people in a positive light is bad or somehow morally wrong, it’s just… how long will we have to hear these backward views?
The petition supposedly amassed 30,000 signatures but, according to Out, many of those signatures are fake or duplicated, as people were able to sign the petition more than once from the same user, provided that they use, so it’s impossible to know how many genuine signatures. One email that was used to sign the petition was frothymixture@aol.com; frothy mixture is a rather crass definition of the neologism “santorum” that was created in response to former Senator Rick Santorum attitudes towards homosexuality and views on same-sex marriage.
I tend not to take people like the ones who created the petition seriously so, in my opinion, this petition doesn’t hold any water. The purpose of the petition, according to LifeSiteNews, was to prove that there is significant opposition to the making of an LGBT-themed Christmas movie, but knowing that a great deal of the signatures probably came from the same number of people, their whole point kind of falls apart.
Source: Newsweek
Evangelicals shouldn’t be watching TV – just reading from their bibble – so what is the problem?