On the latest episode of “Everybody on the Internet is Angry,” the Hallmark Channel found itself caught between a Christian rock and an LGBT hard place. After the network ran a commercial from online wedding firm Zola featuring a lesbian wedding, One Million Moms, a division of the American Family Association, “voiced its concern and gave Hallmark the opportunity to do the right thing.”
Hallmark quickly dropped the ad from its schedule, but after complaints from “prominent LGBT celebrities and advocacy groups” and the rise of #BoycottHallmarkChannel on Twitter, the network reversed its decision, with Hallmark CEO Mike Perry apologizing for the hurt the company had caused and stating, “Hallmark will be working with GLAAD to better represent the LGBT community across our portfolio of brands.”
To some, it may seem this fiasco could have been avoided if certain Christian Hallmark channel viewers weren’t such sensitive babies. “Is the image of two women getting married so troubling,” some might think, “that you can no longer stand to see if Candace Cameron Bure falls in love with the handsome banker who was sent to town to foreclose on her parents’ cinnamon farm?”
But easy as it is to cry “baby” and “bigot” at those who don’t want gay weddings lauded during commercial breaks, the truth is, like most bursts of the culture wars, this specific battle wasn’t really about the outward issue. The problem for many Christians is not so much the ad itself but what the ad represents.
The Hallmark Channel Offered Cleaner Entertainment
In a theological sense, the Hallmark Channel is not a Christian broadcasting network. More to the point, the 6,000 original “Christmas” movies the network airs every December are not genuinely Christian films in content.
The characters rarely, if ever, pray or worship. The plots never revolve around the heroine saving a church or reading Luke’s nativity account to the flannel-clad, hunky widower’s precocious daughter. The stories never end with the couple kneeling in a sanctuary on Christmas Eve, proclaiming the wonders of the God who took on human flesh to save them from their sins.
But, culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian. The characters don’t take off their clothes, murder anyone, or use profanity. The hero loves children and defends the poor. The heroine who begins the story loving her self-involved life in the city chooses family and a life of self-sacrifice in her hometown by the end of the tale.
If you’re a pious Christian mom who wants to escape into a universe where all the cynicism and immorality of modern life aren’t allowed, or if you want to snuggle up with your eight-year-old daughter and watch a silly movie without having to explain inappropriate content you weren’t expecting, the Hallmark Channel is about the only place left that will let you do it.
So when an ad featuring a lesbian couple airs during a commercial break on the Hallmark Channel, it doesn’t upset you because your fragile little Christian heart can’t handle the image of two women in wedding dresses. It upsets you because the ad indicates that the secular left, led by the LGBT mafia, have discovered your last remaining hideout, planted their flag in the ground, and claimed it as their own.
The LGBT Mob Infiltrates All Cultural Spaces
Once upon a time, you could watch a sizable chunk of network TV shows with your children without exposing them to programs that praised fornication (of both the heterosexual and homosexual varieties). Then the children of the sexual revolution got control of the writers’ rooms and the programming decisions, and now you don’t dare let them near a Thursday evening sitcom for fear they’ll contract HPV via satellite dish.
Once, you could take your kids to a Star Wars or superhero movie without being told you weren’t welcome in Skywalkerland or Iron Man Village if you believed homosexuality was contrary to God’s law. Not anymore. Once, you could trust Disney and PBS not to fight actively against the Christian beliefs you wanted your children to hold. Then Disney and PBS stuck gay characters in programs aimed at preschoolers.
Likewise, outside film and TV, you’ve experienced the same thing. The same LGBT movement that claimed almost every network and film series you and your children once watched has now claimed virtually every institution in your daily life.
You worry the local public school will indoctrinate your kids. You worry your daughter will lose her shot at a scholarship because the LGBT mobs have bullied the school board into allowing males identifying as females on women’s athletic teams. You’re no longer welcome at your LGBT-compliant local library if you don’t want sexual deviants dancing in front of your children.
No matter how respectfully you speak, you’re not free to share your Christian beliefs about marriage or gender identity in your place of work, because the human resources department won’t tolerate anything but full-throated endorsement of the LGBT agenda.
The LGBT Mob Won’t Stop at Hallmark
Now GLAAD has showed up to invade the Hallmark Christmas movie bubble, the last place Christian values were still welcome, and bullied the CEO into alienating Hallmark’s Christian audience to avoid angering the LGBT mob.
As obnoxious Christian scolds who are too cool to get their hands dirty in the culture wars are wont to note, Hallmark’s capitulation to GLAAD isn’t exactly the worst thing to happen to Christians in recent memory. Nobody was killed, imprisoned, or beaten — something many Christians in the world don’t have luxury of saying when they face the kind of persecution the unbelieving world is tossing at them.
This is, of course, true. As I’ve noted, it’s also true that Hallmark wasn’t actually producing genuine Christian material prior to kneeling before GLAAD and pledging to help make the most overrepresented demographic on television even more overrepresented.
But it’s important for all Christians not to miss the three-fold point. First, the LGBT mafia zealously desires to drive faithful Christians out of any space where they are welcome. Second, the LGBT mafia is proving to be ruthlessly efficient at carrying out this goal.
Third, the same ruthlessly efficient mob probably won’t be content to take away every metaphorical sanctuary we have and then stop short of seizing our literal ones. If they wouldn’t let us celebrate cheesy Hallmark Christmas without celebrating their sin, they won’t let us celebrate actual Jesus Christmas that way either.
