They say (meaning we say) that adversity can be an excellent crucible.
That whole "As God is my witness, I shall never be hungry/screwed over/poor/gay baited/humiliated/harassed/etc. again!" thing.
If you buy into the logic, then Nebraska must be one of the most dangerous breeding grounds for get-even gay people in the country, as it has provided the hood ornament for the most effective current pop culture gay agenda Trojan Horse, in the person of Omaha's own Andrew Rannels.
His show, "The New Normal," (now on NBC Tuesdays at 8:30, CST) started out as a broad-brushed satirical romp skewering everything within reach.
But now the sitcom's scripts are targeting the heterosexual supremacist jugular even more relentlessly, in millions of living rooms across America.
Right-wingers immediately recognized how dangerous a show like The New Normal is, which didn't surprise us. What did was the failure of even some admirably astute gay bloggers (like Joe Jervis at JoeMyGod, who spots a hundred things a day we don't) to recognize the potential in this show, which AKSARBENT likes a lot.
The ringleader of the show's ensemble agitprop, Rannels, is a real pro at upending convention.
The more you watch him make the donuts, the more layers of subtlety, intensity, off-the-cuff flipness and deep gravitas you unpeel.
Like Sean Hayes (also a terrific actor) on Will and Grace, Rannels can do perfectly-executed barrel rolls en route from comedy to poignancy and back again as many times as the script asks him to.
Unlike Hayes, Rannels has scripts which don't waste entertainment on mere diversion; they yoke it to effective sabotage of an indefensible status quo whose most salient characteristic appears to be inertia.
Too bad for Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown, isn't it? While they weren't looking, some of most talented people in Hollywood, the people who crew the train of popular culture, drew a bead on their decrepit ideology.
(Now even civilians are getting into the act: a fresh, wickedly funny meme has sprung up to mock Brian Brown for making imaginary passes at men.)
Geez, it's bad enough when your opponents start beating you in elections you never lost before, but it's worse when their followers collectively and spontaneous blind-side you by getting the world wide web to point at you and laugh.
All this will inevitably invoke the swan-song of martyrdom that heterosexual supremacists always sing as they nail themselves to the cross: We're being crucified by the gay agenda!
Actually, that marginalization is far more due to collateral damage by a country which moves on by stepping over and sometimes on, those who wear pointless recalcitrance masquerading as principal on their sleeve.
About the invocation of the "gay agenda": The National Organization for Marriage most frequently paints it as the redefinition of marriage, which is turning out to be about as scary to heteros as extending 'employee pricing' to everybody.
Gay people, of course, would differently define the agenda they never wanted to shoulder in the first place as something like: Getting the Dead Weight of Force-of-Law Prejudice Off Our Backs and Fronts.
The determinant of which definition succeeds depends on the resources you have to persuade your audience that your version is right.
Right now gay people have the best screenwriters in the entertainment firmament, the best actors, film editors and one of the biggest television networks on the planet to sell their point of view.
Conversely, Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown have only an out-of-touch pope who looks like the resurrection of a Third Reich Dracula and their special victims unit which tortures facts and circumstance so much that even some of their manufactured martyrs have cried foul after seeing NOM's YouTube videos.
We know which horse we'll bet on for the long haul.
What set us off on all this was the poignant final scene of this weeks episode of The New Normal, in which the two male principals look at an unnecessarily baby-proofed Christmas tree that will be put away long before the blessed event, discarding the powerful emotional iconography of their respective families' ornaments, as the camera slowly zoomed in on a tiny sonogram of their en route little boy.
Against expertly-crafted mass media emotional battering rams like this, AKSARBENT doesn't see much future growth in the hater's franchise.
But hey, good riddance.
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