Of all the weird shit I've seen from the nutzoid Christian right (which, to be fair, is really just "the right"), the attacks on the Walt Disney Company over their criticism of Florida's "Fuck You for Being Gay or Trans" bill and the state's slimy, squamous governor, Ron DeSantis, as well as its declarations that its going to be friendlier to LGBTQ kids and adults in its parks and media, is some of the weirdest. I mean, it's conservatives have bitched about pop culture for a long time, but this is just fucking weird.
It's not like Disney World is gonna feature "Baloo's Buggering Boat" ride or "Ariel's Muff-Diving Adventure" or "Goofy's Groomin' Gang" show. What Disney did was say that they would work to repeal the cruel law after they were criticized for not speaking out before its passage. It's essentially what every single corporation does all the time with legislation. Oil companies try to overturn laws that want to do some small thing about climate change, which, you know, is way, way more important than whether or not a teacher tells his 1st graders about happy gay penguins.
The assholes calling on "woke" Disney to be "canceled" are the usual array of motherfuckers. Fox "news" has gone to threat level 1619 on this bullshit, mentioning the company hundreds of time during the past week. And conservative cockfleas are looking for anything that can be perceived as dirt. For instance, at a Disney corporate Zoom meeting that was recorded and leaked to sentient scum skimmer Christopher Rufo (who caused the whole critical race theory lie to blow up our 2021), Karey Burke, president of Disney’s General Entertainment Content, said, "I’m here as a mother of two queer children, actually. One transgender child and one pansexual child, and also as a leader," which is nice and honest and also means she's evil and satanic and should probably have child services called on her or some such shit, except she's fortunate enough to live in California, which is notably sane.
She said she wanted the company to put out entertainment featuring "underrepresented" groups and "We have many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads, and narratives in which gay characters just get to be characters." The horror. That a trans woman might actually just be a hero without it being about the fact that she's a trans woman. Oh, no. The terrifying normalization of it all.
And if you wanna know how stupid this goes, they're also upset that Disney parks will no longer use gendered language in its announcements. No more "ladies and gentlemen" or "boys and girls." Instead, announcements will call people "friends" or "guests." To pretend that that's a big deal is to have no sense of proportion in your life. "Motherfucker," I'd say to someone who was angry about that, "don't you have bills to pay or a job to go to or something else to do?"
That's not even getting into all the religious shit underpinning this whole retro attitude towards LGBTQ people. "God’s gift of 'imagination' has been deeply corrupted in this case," writes some fucker for the Family Research Council (motto: "Grooming kids for Jesus's loving arms").
Why does this matter? Why waste our time talking about and thinking about this? I mean, after all, Disney is an over-huge megacorporation that tailors its shit to stay on the good side of vile governments in China and elsewhere. It's not some anodyne movie company forcing more Star Wars down our throats. It regularly dicks over employees. It's too fucking big and should be broken up. It will be fine no matter how many backwards ass yahoos decide to start watching Ben Shapiro's bullshit kids programming that the Daily Wire claims it's going to create with $100 million. In many ways, Disney is everything wrong with capitalism, and I don't say that just because a dear friend lost his job with Marvel after it was gobbled up by Disney, although that's certainly part of it. So why not just let Disney take its lumps and fuck them for being in bed with the fuck ghouls of the right in the first place?
Because it's fucked up. It's fucked up because if you oppose the very idea of "cancel culture," then you should oppose this attempt to tear down Disney (which will fail because see above paragraph) because what the fuck else is this but very real cancellation? Of course, those who screech about cancel culture are really just mad they can't use racist and sexist and homophobic and ableist language without consequences. So fuck anyone who wants to do the opposite.
Mostly, though, this is a very real battle in the Culture War. As I said above, right now, we're going through a whole lot of fearmongering over LGBTQ educators in ways that I really had hoped we were past. Instead, we're seeing a resurgence in the kinds of lies that are going to get people fucking killed: gay teachers are grooming children when they teach about Heather and her two mommies. In other words, those teachers want to fuck your kids and they're teaching them about queer shit in order to make them willing to be fucked. It's some QAnon-adjacent madness, the kind of unreal hyperbole we saw at the confirmation hearing of Ketanji Brown Jackson, but it's spreading and it's going to silence LGBTQ teachers, if not drive them out of some states. It's also about stigmatizing transgender kids and their families, destroying them or banishing them. They are going all the way back to the really old days, with gays and lesbians seen as actively "recruiting" kids and molesting them. Like I said, it's fucked up. This retrenchment of homo- and transphobia in this violent age is fucking frightening.
And in a frightening Culture War, you want a big fucking culture warrior on your side. So, yeah, I want Disney to fucking get active here and support some politicians and destroy others. I want it to threaten to take its entire fucking operation to another state. Florida was a shitty backwater state with NASA, Miami, and beaches before Disney arrived. In order to force Disney to back down, DeSantis is already threatening to take away Disney's self-government status, which it absolutely should never have had, but if it's enough to piss off the giant mouse, then let's go. Sometimes when you're the biggest motherfucker in the room, you gotta act like you are. Wreck these pricks and then Disney can get back to grooming kids to be good consumers of Disney products.
Of course, there is a very simple alternative: if conservatives want to ban corporate money from politics, then let's fuckin' well get it done.
