A New York Times op-ed calling Rudolph the “queerest holiday special” has #triggered right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro.
Right wing extremist Ben Shapiro is demanding LGBTQ people leave Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer alone. Shapiro, who runs the far right website The Daily Wire, says the popular children’s Christmas character has enough problems and doesn’t need any more.
“Can’t you just leave Rudolph alone?” Shapiro asked on his radio show. “Like, he’s got enough problems without you putting your own issues with sexual orientation on his fragile flying back.”
Shapiro, who is virulently anti-LGBTQ, was reading from Wednesday’s New York Times opinion piece, “‘Rudolph,’ the Queerest Holiday Special,” written by English professor and transgender advocate Jennifer Finney Boylan.
“As for ‘Rudolph,’ the whole movie feels as L.G.B.T.Q. friendly to me as any episode of ‘Queer Eye’ or ‘Steven Universe’ or ‘The L Word,’” Boylan wrote.
“Except for the fact that,” Shapiro notes, “You know, Rudolph doesn’t have sex with any of the other male reindeer.”
Shapiro, like many other conservatives, boils being gay down to having sex.
“I’m particularly tired of the hijacking of children’s literature and children’s specials to promote political viewpoints on sexual matters,” Shapiro, who apparently is unfamiliar with LGBTQ people and culture, says. “Like, it’s a piece of children’s literature, cut it out.”
“The left likes to play this game a lot when it comes to TV,” Shapiro says, wrongly, accusing some LGBTQ people of “hijacking” SpongeBob SquarePants.
(It’s important to note that Shapiro is having this conversation with himself on his radio show while the U.S. House of Representatives is engaged in a debate over impeaching the President.)
Ben Shapiro attacks the LGBTQ community for saying they relate to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: “Can’t you just leave Rudolph alone? Like, he’s got enough problems without you putting your own issues with sexual orientation on his fragile flying back” pic.twitter.com/TxoQs4DQh1
— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) December 12, 2019
He then went on to accuse “some members of the LGBT community” in the early ’90s of “sugggesting that some of the Teletubbies were gay.”
“Jerry Falwell made a comment about, ‘Well, the Teletubbies aren’t gay,’” Shapiro insisted, falsely. “It’s silly to try and hijack children’s characters and the left was like, ‘A ha, trolled you, trolled you,” Shapiro said.
Except that’s not what happened, not at all.
Jerry Falwell is the deceased far-right religious extremist who is best remembered for these comments about the 9/11 terror attacks:
“I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”
And it was Jerry Falwell, not LGBTQ people, who said one of the Teletubbies was gay.
“Tinky Winky, one of four characters on the children’s TV show ‘Teletubbies,’ is gay and therefore a moral menace to American youth, the former Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell warns,” The New York Times reported in May of 1999. “Mr. Falwell said the creators of the program intended for Tinky Winky to be a gay role model.”
”He is purple — the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle — the gay-pride symbol,” he wrote. He also noted that Tinky Winky carries a purse-like bag.
Seems Shapiro just can’t seem to get anything straight.
And as for “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer,” yes, that New York Times opinion piece is correct.
Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Top Image via Wikipedia
