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| Peter LaBarbera is angry at 'Love, Simon' for showing a positive image of the gay community. |
I haven't written about anti-LGBTQ activist 'Porno' Peter LaBarbera in a long time. I don't find him relevant anymore. The only reason why I'm posting about him today is because of the audacity he has to whine about the hit movie, "Love, Simon."
From Right Wing Watch:
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| Peter LaBarbera |
Anti-LGBTQ activist Peter LaBarbera was, unsurprisingly, not a fan of the new gay teenage romance film “Love, Simon,” complaining to Religious Right radio host Janet Mefferd on Tuesday that the film fails to promote a “religious message” and does not warn audiences that gay people face a life of physical and mental illness “and of course the judgment of God.”
LaBarbera joined Mefferd on Tuesday to weigh in on the release of “Love, Simon,” which is a romantic comedy film that features a 17-year-old boy who reveals his sexual orientation to his friends and family and falls in love with a classmate. LaBarbera, who has long been livid about the entertainment industry advancing LGBTQ causes, shared with Mefferd what he saw to be “three myths” promoted in the film.
“Number one is that being homosexual—quote-unquote ‘gay’—is basically who you are, intrinsically who you are. You know, if that line just happens to be gay. That’s number one. Number two, that there’s a total mutual equivalence between homosexual romances and the gay lifestyle and normal, heterosexual living, so it’s presented as totally equal.
Number three, that parental love, the way they love their son after he comes out and declares his homosexuality or they find out, the parents, is they just basically express regret they didn’t know earlier,” he said. “There’s no sorrow. There’s no religious message at all in the movie, Janet, and there’s nothing that says any disapproval.”
LaBarbera said he believed the movie was “like a Disney gay movie” that was made for teenagers before complaining that “there’s no aftermath after this boy finds his quote-unquote ‘gay’ romance.”
“We’re never going to hear later about the diseases associated with homosexuality that he likely would get, mental illness, and of course the judgment of God,” LaBarbera said.
LaBarbera deserves to be mocked, but I still find him amusingly insulting. He seems to think he has the right to tell the LGBTQ community who we are. He thinks he knows us better than ourselves to the point where he gets to determine the stories we tell. We know the horror stories about our lives LaBarbera wants to tell - evil yarns about oversexed, unhappy, multi-diseased gays who waste away in pools of their own excesses.
Too bad for him. It's not our job to coddle his religious beliefs or buttress his hate. The way we tell our authentic stories is for us to decide, not someone who is ruled by delusion springing from internal things I would talk further about if I had any experience in psychology. LaBarbera is so indicative of the rest of the religious right who get angry at us for daring to tell our stories truthfully and away from the lies and stereotypes they generate about us. How dare we take control and not fall for the web of self-hatred they craft for us out of their twisted version of religion, cherry-picked and junk science, and plain hatred. They have a right to believe whatever they want about us, but they don't have the right to make us believe their lies. Nor do they have the right to control how we tell our own stories.
LaBarbera will just have to get over his anger at "Love, Simon.". If not, he knows where he can go.
Do you think LaBarbera truly believes it's inevitable for the real-life counterparts of a character like Simon to get HIV, become horribly depressed, die young and wind up in hell or is this just a schtick he's spouting because he's been saying this for decades and it's how he makes his living? Can anyone be clueless enough not to realize the world is changing and that while the plot of LOVE, SIMON is very optimistic, it's quite true that teenagers are coming out in high school and often getting accepted by their peers and famlly? I'm not a huge fan of the film itself, which struck me as a gay version of a mediocre '80s teen comedy, but the fact that a scene of two boys kissing is cheered both by the audience on-screen and in the audience (when I saw it) is a major sign of progress.
ReplyDelete"There’s no religious message at all in the movie, Janet, and there’s nothing that says any disapproval."
ReplyDeleteThat could be because the vast majority of Americans never go to church. Sure there are C&E Christians who only show up at Christmas and Easter. but most Americans are not even going for funerals and weddings.
If LaBee doesn't think this is true, he should look at all the casual references to "You don't have to go to church to be a good Christian" excuse perpetrated by politicians who depend on religion to get votes.
La Barbera is a sterling example of the kind of arrogant self-absorption that seems to be a basic characteristic of contemporary "Christians" -- far from believing that another point of view is wrong, they can't even conceive of the notion that there is another point of view.
ReplyDeleteHe's also been an abject failure during his entire career -- remember, he's the one who, on his second try, couldn't even get enough signatures for a "ban same-sex marriage" referendum to submit the petitions. I still can't figure out why he bothered -- referendums in Illinois are advisory only and have no binding effect on the legislature. (This is when he was head of Illinois Family Institute, which under his leadership not only failed to stop gay civil rights legislation, but became the first state-level organization to be designated a hate group by the SPLC.)
I think it’s absolutely monstrous that this film doesn’t have things in it that Mr LaBarbera would have liked to see in it. While we’re about it, here are some other things that could have been in it but aren’t.
ReplyDelete1. Why isn’t Simon persuaded to go to an ex-gay ministry, where the formerly homosexual male counsellor tries to have sex with him, and is then discovered to have done the same with most of the other young gay men who have been pressurized into coming to his ministry?
2. Why doesn’t he waste a decade or so of his life trying one useless ex-gay ministry and sexual re-orientation therapist after another, before realising that he’s been cruelly conned?
3. Why doesn’t he finally, for the sake of “complementarity”, contract an unworkable marriage with some unsuspecting young woman, thus complicating both his life and hers and depriving her of the genuine heterosexual relationship that she ought to have?