The Palmetto Grande in Mt. Pleasant ran the Alliance for Full Acceptance’s campaign, Acceptance Without Exception for a week before pulling the ads after an unknown (but apparently limited) number of complaints. The ads run through various takes on “Some of the best ___ are gay.” The most scandalous part of the ad is the word “gay,” but apparently that was enough to send one mother to the manager of the theater to complain.
Warren Redman-Gress with AFFA said that the theater manager relayed the story of the woman coming to him to complain that her six-year-old daughter wanted to know what “gay” meant. Though there were other complaints, they apparently weren’t logged and this was the only particular complaint the manager could provide.
Redmond-Gress was planning to discuss this with the AFFA board tonight to decide their next step, but there will likely be some coordinated reaction.
“We can’t just let this go,” he says. “This is a teachable moment here.”
One Comment
I have too much sympathy and hesitation for forgiveness of ignorance when it comes to parents explaining to their children what “gay” means. And I shouldn’t be so nice or direct, and non rhetorical with my arguments. It’s one thing to occasionally tolerate individual friends and family who insist on being assholes of any sort. But adults are not elligible to have their ignorance indulged. Ask any law enforcemetn officer.
I can respect different methods of communication that different families have, especially about gender and sexuality, as long as their IS communication; some have long ongoing discussions, some have short, embarassed, metaphoric discussions and then hand over a stack of books, and some just quietly hand over an age appropriate book every other year or so to mutual chagrin. But it’s not acceptable to not talk about it at all. And that’s exactly what this mother is doing by suggesting it’s a problem telling her daughter what gay means. Gay is an umbrella term describing homosexuals, bisexuals, transgenders, intergenders, and any other dignified sexual identity or orientation that is not exclusively heterosexual. And the only people who don’t know that or pretend to have a problem with that are COWARDS, choosing to remain ignorant, and to some degree intentionally sexist and bigotted to fit in with a very rapidly shrinking majority (that btw is no longer even referred to as the MORAL majority). The days of respectable Americans and Christians using fundamentalist ideologies and hermeneutics as safety nets to hate and twist definitions of words like “love” and “dignity” beyond all reasonable recognition are numbered.
Personally I would love to get a group of Southern Baptists into a time machine to the 19th or even early 20th century to ask fellow white, heterosexual, Southern Baptists what freedom should mean to black Christians and see the horrified looks on their faces when they get honest, “Christian” answers.
Maybe they just need something scarier and more complicated to be ignorant and afraid of… I’m sure it’s on its way. That’s the very nature of growth and progress.