Modern Family presents homosexuality as nice, pleasant and fun
Modern Family presents gayness in such a pleasant and positive light, it’s done more for gay-rights activism than any gay op-ed or slogan has ever done.
Make no mistake, this was by strategic intention. Marshall Kirk and “Erastes Pill” (a pseudonym for Hunter Madsen) laid it out decades ago in a strategy document they called “The Overhauling of Straight America.” Written in 1987, it’s a disturbing paper yet still worth the read if you can stand it, for the insight it gives into decades of gay activism.
Kirk and Pill speak of opening up
“a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed. As far as desensitization is concerned, the medium is the message — of normalcy. So far, gay Hollywood has provided our best covert weapon in the battle to desensitize the mainstream.”
It’s a strategy centered in positive imagery: “For openers, naturally, we must continue to encourage the appearance of favorable gay characters in films and TV shows,” they write. “The visual media, film and television, are plainly the most powerful image-makers in Western civilization.”
Their approach has been astonishingly effective. Consider the strategic savvy of what they’re setting up in Beauty and the Beast. If we say, “That’s wrong!” people will hear it as “That’s ugly” instead. Everything is happening on the level of images, remember.
So there’s no easy way for conservatives to object without looking ugly ourselves. They’ve put us in a corner. If we object, we lose now. If we don’t object, we lose later, when Disney plies gay princes and princesses upon us. Disney is the Beauty, critics are the Beast.
Overhauling Under Way
But how did that happen? How did we get that way? It comes out of “Overhauling Straight America.” Opponents “must be vilified,” say Kirk and Pill:
The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes. … Bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred to a degree that looks both comical and deranged; menacing punks, thugs, and convicts speaking coolly about the “f*gs” they have killed or would like to kill; a tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? If you haven’t seen those precise images, still you know how neatly Christians have been maneuvered into the place of the “intolerant haters.” You could almost admire a strategy so effective, if it weren’t so dishonestly manipulative.
