There are a million reasons not to watch Glee, Fox's unicorn turd of jazz hands in a field of rainbows, most of which have to do with the uneven plot lines, inconsistent characters, and movie-of-the-week sentimentality. Fox News blowhard Bill O'Reilly has a whole new reason not to watch the show: it might make you gay.
Well, that's not quite what he and Gretchen Carlson, a blond wig that whispers intolerance, have to say about the show, but it's something close. The pair takes umbrage with Unique, a transgender character on Tuesday's episode. Yes, the show's after school special moment this week was about being the person who you are inside, even if that person happens to be of a different gender than you were born with. Bill and the Whispering Wig think that this show will make children experiment with being gay and transgender because they saw it on television.
This is such a steaming pile of bulls**t. Bill says that when he saw James Dean smoking he thought James Dean was cool and so if kids see gay and transgender people on Glee they'll think it's cool and they'll want to give it a shot. The problem with that is almost every kid knows that being gay isn't cool. Saying something is "gay" is still the highest insult to teenagers and calling people the six-letter f-word is still a common epithet for those still young and stupid enough to toss it around. Kids know that being gay isn't "cool." However, it is something that is a part of people's lives and something that the younger generations are coming to accept that more than Bill and Righteous Indignation Barbie ever will.
Also, Bill, being gay or transgender, while it may come with a certain set of behaviors, is not a behavior like smoking. It's an identity. It's an orientation. It's about something deep inside that needs to be expressed. The show hopes to communicate that to the people out there that feel it and explain those people to a mainstream audience. It's not trying to recruit. If it were, based on the number of iTunes downloads the show gets every week, we'd already have swarms of sissy boys and dykes on bikes at every pep rally at every high school in all of America.
Watching television doesn't have that ability to change a person fundamentally. Heck, I religiously watched ER in high school and I didn't end up wanting to be a doctor. I didn't even end up wanting to go to medical school. Or to law school or the police academy. Considering the amount of hours I've logged watching countless people pursue those "lifestyles," if that hasn't turned me, then nothing will.
Bill, next time you want to tell people to stop watching Glee, tell them to stop watching it because it's bad. Leave the whole gay thing out of it.
Here's their full conversation, if you can even stand it.
