Sean Saves The World: World Gives Up Hope

Oh good!
Someone's done something about a gayer who is - you won't believe this comedy zinger - a dad!
No-one's done that before!
Where do they come up with these brilliant ideas?
The world needs more stuff about gay men who are dads, I can't get enough of them.
I never tire of hearing about them, no sirree!
And I imagine it will have hilarious consequences. 
And they've got that gay from Will & Grace to play... a gay!
Double whammy!!!
Can't wait for this one!
But will it be as ribtickling a gay comedy romp as the smash hit brit sit-com Vicious?
We can but ask...

• Oops! The New Normal and Partners axed.

Ryan Murphy: Changing The Channels

“I was at a fundraising event at Rob Reiner’s house and I was talking to the lawyers who are fighting to get Proposition 8 overturned,” Murphy says. “And I asked them why they thought public opinion on gay marriage has changed so much in the last four years.” 
According to Murphy, the legal duo answered without a moment’s hesitation: “Television.”

“I remember being young and hearing my parents having a very derogatory conversation about Paul Lynde while they were watching him on Hollywood Squares,” Murphy recalls. “They thought every gay person was like him, and I thought, Well, I do like scarves, it’s true, but I’m not Paul Lynde,” he says dryly. “That memory stuck with me, so whenever I got any kind of ‘power’ in television, I tried to showcase different kinds of gay people and always made sure gay people were represented in my projects.”
Not that this showcasing came easily to Murphy. “When I first started working in the entertainment industry, it was out of the question to have an authentically gay character on television. Forget it! Forget it.” On his first TV show, Popular, a WB teen dramedy set in the Hobbesian world of public high school, Murphy would get notes from the network criticizing his straight characters as “too gay.” Other shows he pitched around town with gay characters, or even straight characters “with a gay sensibility,” as Murphy describes them, were turned down for being too polarizing and unfamiliar to audiences. “Now it’s like, if you don’t have a gay character, something is wrong with your show.”

Interesting interview with Ryan Murphy in the new issue of Out, with much discussion about how TV has changed over the years, and the potential for TV to change how the world sees The Gays.
The latter subject is this season's hot gay topic in the media, and Murphy may be slightly overstating his case - the first quote above is ridiculously reductive hyperbole.
If only it was that easy... 

Television: Shoving It Down Our Throats!

We once were a people largely united under what was right and what was wrong. It was a nation under God. 
However, there has been a RELENTLESS attack upon God and upon godliness. The evidences of the spiritual/moral slide has been lengthy and increasingly the “chickens have come home to roost.” Americans love their televisions, stories and sitcoms and with the passing years knowing the difference between right and wrong has eroded through the concerted campaign of Hollywood. Network television began to shove homosexuality down our throats years ago: 
America’s most powerful influence makers have intensified their public relations blitz aimed at convincing Americans that homosexual behavior is normal and more specifically, that homosexual “marriage” should be legalized. 
In what USA Today has called the “gayest TV season in memory,”* network programmers – subsidized by well-known companies – have become more and more bold in their homosexual advocacy. 
“It is amazing to see two gay weddings within a month on two big sitcoms. It seems like they’re trying to push some buttons. Even in the gay community, a full-on-same-sex marriage is a minority kind of thing,” said Rob Greenblatt, executive vice president of development for Fox. “It is 1996, and little by little everybody has gotten a little less afraid of the old taboos.” [Taken from Washington Times, 1/25/96; USA Today, 1/31/96, AFA Journal March 1996] 
There is a God in the universe who created all things. The very breath we breathe, the sun that warms, the gravity that holds things together, the seasons, the rules of nature, natural law are all shaped by God. 

The American Decency Association via Right Wing Watch. 

Fagburn doesn't usually like to give jerks like this the oxygen of publicity - and it's hardly worth noting when some professional nutty homophobe says something nutty and homophobic - but this made me chuckle.

Here they are last month on how Glee - “a gruel of illicit sexuality, secular humanist ideology, and the promotion of homosexuality and deviant behavior” - is "poisoning our youth".
And a few days ago on The New Normal's Sly Indoctrination...

"A propaganda-piece in the guise of a sitcom. However, in the hour-long season finale creator/producer Ryan Murphy pulled out all the stops to proselytize viewers into accepting the debased gay agenda as “normal.”
Promote gay marriage?  Check.
Champion homosexual parenting?  Check.
Undermine the church and mock God and His righteousness?  Double check."

* Can't find this online, just seems to be quoted a lot on Christian websites. 

Update: New Findings from Ipsos MediaCT TV Dailies Study Shows TV’s Impact on America’s Gay Marriage Debate - sounds a bit simplistic, but such is so often the way with such studies.

The New Normal: The New Boring

The New Normal - the new sitcom from Glee creator Ryan Murphy - starts on E4 this evening.
It's about a gay male couple who have a surrogate baby.
That's right, they're gay dads, and wh...

Sorry, I fell asleep just typing that.
The only interesting thing about this is how quickly a subject that was once outré can become a cultural cliché. 

PS It's rumoured Elton John's had a second baby. Zzzz...

Television: Making Gay The New Normal?

Shows with gay characters, like Glee, Modern Family, and The New Normal, are helping drive voters to historically unprecedented support of gay marriage, an Oct. 29 THR poll conducted in conjunction with partner Penn Schoen Berland has found. Though gay TV also makes some voters more intensely opposed to gay marriage, they are outnumbered by voters who become more supportive of gay marriage, influenced by what they see on TV...
In the past 10 years, the THR poll of likely voters across the nation found, about three times as many voters have become more pro-gay marriage as have become more anti-gay marriage -- 31 percent pro, 10 percent anti.
Asked about how the shows influenced them, 27 percent said gay TV made them more pro-gay marriage, and six percent more anti. Obama voters watched and 30 percent got more supportive, 2 percent less supportive. Surprisingly, the shows made almost as many Romney voters more in favor of gay marriage: 13 percent got more pro-gay-marriage, 12 percent got more anti. (This trend toward gay acceptance squares with other polls: the 2011 Gallup poll was the first ever to show a majority, 53 percent, in favor of legalizing gay marriage...)
Obama voters are twice as likely to watch Modern Family as Romney voters are, twice as likely to watch Glee, and three times more likely to watch The New Normal...  *

Hollywood Reporter.

Interesting, but reductive as it implies television is the main driver behind changes in social attitudes.
Turn tellybox on, watch tellybox, mind changed, problem solved...
Of course popular culture matters - I don't think I'd bother writing about it if I didn't think it did. 
But what happens in the cultural, political and social spheres all interact and overlap, and it's surely the latter - our interactions with real people - that has really transformed our world.
Mind you, what kind of a freak wants to be "normal"?

• So maybe Catholic Online et al are onto something with their 'Fightback against gay TV in your home'?

* This contradicts the oft-quoted line that Republicans are more likely to watch Modern Family. Thus scientifically proving that at least 50% of surveys about The Gays must be bollocks. 

Gay TV: The Fightback Begins!

Fight back against Gay TV in your home!

The homosexual lobby is subverting society by infiltrating our homes.

Buried in the noise of the presidential campaign and everything else, a new TV show aired last month on NBC. Dubbed, "The New Normal" the TV show centers on a homosexual pair who consider themselves "married" and are having a baby by surrogate.

At least one NBC affiliate in Utah found the content of the show to be so objectionable, they refused to air it. The show runs during prime time hours and is intended to make light of homosexual relations and surrogate motherhood.
Most critically, the show, as its title implies, is attempting to normalize deviant behavior.

There's nothing normal about homosexual equivalency and gay parenting. If fact, it's so abnormal, it is the subject of a TV show where the title insists that it is normal; but an Orwellian twist cannot change reality - it cannot rewrite natural law.

Catholic Online, alongside many faithful across America, is alarmed by this attempt to place the topic of homosexual relations and parenting in prime time where children can be exposed to the normative brainwashing of hyper-liberal media executives whose primary interests are ratings and money.

Producers of the show may even have a different interest, hoping to drive social change by convincing entire households, including children, that homosexual unions are "normal."

In response to this, Catholic Online has developed a petition, which readers are invited to sign. The petition, which is linked below, will tell the producers of this show that their message of moral decay is unwelcome in our homes...

Catholic Online. 

It's a good argument, well put.
And who wouldn't take moral guidance from those paragons of moral virtue, the Catholic church?
I urge you to sign this petition forthwith - ideally with a made-up scatological name.

PS E4 have bought The New Normal. No idea when they're showing it, yet.