The Glade 4.0

Disclaimer: I'm not sure how controversial this will be on the current makeup of the Glade. It could be you're all going to agree with me. Nevertheless, this is a religious/political discussion and I thought I'd avoid posting it in Entertainment.

In the remake of Disney's Beauty & the Beast, they have made the character of LaFou, Gaston's sidekick, into a homosexual. This is a natural progression from the old cartoon, where LaFou was seriously starstruck and idolizing/mancrushing on Gaston from beginning to end, so making him actually crush on Gaston is not much of a stretch. Nevertheless, this is a Disney kids movie. We're talking about an unrequited crush, not graphic depictions of anal pounding.

Nevertheless, this is becoming controversial. (It is odd that in a movie about a woman falling in love with a buffalo-like beast, a gay crush is the controversial part, but I digress.)

Some backwater hicksville theater in Alabama has declined to show the movie.
-Meh. So what. It's their revenue loss. People will see it elsewhere.

Russia is considering banning the movie as "gay propaganda.
-Now we're getting into idiocy, but surprise! None of us knew Russia was a socially backward shithole!

Then we get to Malaysia, where the movie will not be screening at all.
-What strikes me about this, is it is not Malaysia's choice to ban the movie. Malaysia was going to force theaters to cut a tiny part of the movie to make the homosexuality of one character less obvious, because movies in Malaysia are only allowed to show homosexual characters if they die (or "straighten up"). Disney's response to this is, in my opinion, highly ethical and perfect. I'm paraphrasing here, but they've essentially told Malaysia, "We don't need the box office from your socially regressive little country stuck in the dark ages. You are not allowed to censor our movie. Your citizens will all watch it on the Internet anyway, so **** off."

Big corporations rarely take a moral stance that will result in obvious lost revenue. Kudos to Disney for doing so.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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OH NOES!!! TEH GAYS!!! WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!!!

Morons. Every last goddamn one of them.

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Holy shitsnacks!

My youngest was obsessed with Beauty and the Beast and watched it so much a DVD and a VHS wore out in a year. i was going to pass on this one, bit thanks to bigotry... Now i have to see it

But damn those Homoz and their agendas. I know all about the gay agenda. my former roommates pushed their sinister plan so much
wake up, work, come home, cook, play video games. This is as opposed to the obviously superior hetero agenda: wake up, work, come home, cook, play video games.



Those evil bastards

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

So, one hick theater in Alabama and 2 countries that don't give a **** what we think about social mores.

This doesn't even qualify as a controversy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Holy ****, that's dark.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Perhaps not. Though that one theater in Alabama is certainly getting some support for their stance. But regardless, what I like most is Disney has just basically decided to give up ~3-5 million in revenue by refusing to allow Malaysia to make a 30 second cut to their movie, entirely on moral grounds. (If the same thing happens in Russia, it would be more of a 15-25 million dollar loss in revenue.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I don't care personally about this foolishness at all, but then again, I'm not a Disney shareholder.

If I were, I'd question their decision. Nobody will go to see this movie just because there's a gay character, but there are folks that won't see it because there is. As a shareholder I'd insist that making a social statement at the cost of revenue isn't good company stewardship.

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In time, this too shall pass.

Right. This was the point of a very good book about flaws in the corporate model resulting in large, publicly-traded megacorps behaving in typically sociopathic ways.

This is why I am always pleasantly surprised when I see a company manage to get out of that hole. Values should generally come before profits.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I thought the same folks in the US that would be up in arms about this were also against depictions of magic. I guess that's ok now?

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When he's underwater does he get wet? Or does the water get him instead?

Corporate responsibility to shareholders isn't sociopathic. There are corporate laws that require "corporate directors and managers to pursue long-term, sustainable shareholder wealth maximization in preference to the interests of other stakeholders or society at large".

Now, I won't pretend to know those laws, or even cite them (without google, and if you want, feel free to check "Breach of Fiduciary Duty Law" or some such), but I've found plenty of references to them and if I were a Disney shareholder and the movie revenue was impacted to a obvious degree, I'd have an issue.

Corporations not persuing someone's social agenda's isn't cause for considering them "sociopathic". Taking an agnostic approach is socially neutral.

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In time, this too shall pass.

I know, that's the point of the book I linked. While a company cannot actually be sociopathic, the behavior of corporations due to laws that force them to maximize shareholder wealth at the expense of other ethical considerations is indistinguishable from what a psychologist would call sociopathic.



And you might be right to do so. That's the problem with those laws -- they FORCE a company to act in sociopathic ways, even if they don't want to do so.




You refer to "someone's social agenda" as if the corporation itself doesn't have values and ethics concerns that it wants to follow. This would be like faulting a publicly traded "Christian book store" for not carrying Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris bestsellers. Disney does have a long tradition of adhering to certain corporate mission statements, values, and corporate vision at the expense of profits going all the way back to Walt himself. They've become the largest entertainment and media company in the world, despite this. I am always pleased when I see them doing it in this obvious a manner.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Usually there's far fewer people up in arms over such things than either side makes it appear.

20 years ago focus on the family or some such group tried boycotting Disney. Turns out that conservatives are just less interested in boycotting and protesting that equivalently liberal people would be in return.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Disney is worth about 92 billion in assets. Losing 3-5 or even 15-25 million is peanuts - especially when you factor in potential backlash in the West if they allowed Malaysia or Russia to make such a change. Disney has branded itself as gay friendly. That is not wisely cast aside. The bottom line was first here, not morality. Don't fool yourself. Enlightened self-interest is enlightened but it's still self-interest.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I have major problems with sexualizing childrens entertainment.

Children do not need to be bombarded with sexual messaging, no matter the preference.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Its nothing new. Bugs Bunny has been cross-dressing as a busty woman and kissing Elmer Fudd for years.
I guess I'm less bothered by exposing my kids to sex than I am by exposing them to violence. Of course the kind of sex matters.
Non-consensual sex=No
irresponsible sex =No
Underage sex=No
Safe Sex between consenting adults=Okay

Bugs Bunny is a rabbit, and the entire thing can't possibly be mistaken for anything sexual or romantic even by young children.



Violence is just as much a part of life as sex is. Children will need to know how to deal with violence before they learn how to deal with sex.

The dream of a world without violence is a nightmare. Humans without conflict would descend into decadent indolence. Look at the whining over oppression in this country. No one here is oppressed. Even when people were oppressed here it was still better than elsewhere. The Western world is a bunch of spoiled brats.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

It's my understanding the entirety of the "gay moment" is LeFou giving a big "wiiiink!" That's not even worth mentioning, let alone focusing on.

Regardless, I was going to let my daughter see it anyway. Even my wife, who is far more conservative than I am (I am not very conservative) didn't care that such a thing existed in the movie even before knowing what the specifics were.

My daughter can decide for herself what's what as she continues to grow. She has given me long and lingering kisses. She has given her Wonder Woman dolls long and lingering kisses. We react the same way to both. That she should keep kisses short until she gets married (she's three).

I am not going to force a sexuality onto her, in either direction. Especially this young. Because that can bite a parent in the *** from both sides. I have a self-proclaimed hardcore liberal sister-in-law who decided that her daughter was a lesbian.... when she was still five years old, simply because she wasn't interested in boys. So she pushed her in that direction, and has continued to do so. To me that's just as bad as a parent forcing heterosexuality onto a child.

LeFou is not going to do any damage to my child, or any other child. Parents can do that all on their own.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Beauty & the Beast is a love story to start with. (For that matter, so are half of the children's stories ever told. Snow White? Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty? Wall-E? Tired of Disney? How about Shrek? How to Train Your Dragon?) You don't talk about "sexualizing children's entertainment" when it's a heterosexual romance, as long as there's no sex implied. Why is a homosexual crush any different?

Romance stories have always been a staple of children's entertainment. Now that we've gotten out of the dark ages and accept love in any form, it's important that children are exposed to the truth that it doesn't matter who you love, before some jackass bigot has a chance to indoctrinate them otherwise. There's nothing overtly sexual about that, anymore than there was in the romance stories to start with.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Because a children's love story isn't sexualized.

It doesn't talk about sexuality.

Making it a point to observe a sexual preference DOES sexualize, however.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

And yet every time we see a man crush on a woman, we have made a point to observe a sexual preference.

This is the double standard so many are trying to fight. We have to see people attracted to the same sex just as casually as we see attraction to the opposite sex. Right now, this isn't true even for LGBT people. It's noteworthy when we see a married gay couple in fiction, treated just like a married straight couple. Why? Because it's not done that often. If we treated it the same as we treated heterosexuality, nobody would even have noted (different from noticed) that LaFou is gay in this movie, because we wouldn't have cared.

But society DOES care. It objects when someone treats homosexuality the same way they treat heterosexuality (which is what Disney is doing here.) We pretend that somehow, LaFou crushing on Gaston in the remake is "sexualizing a story for children," but never cared at all when Gaston crushed on Belle 26 years ago.

And that's why it's still an issue.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

This is why we need to have an innate psychological association between gay and something completely mundane like right angles. That way you can be assaulted by gay from all sides the way the simple act of breathing is an inescapable reminder of straight people ****. It's just not fair that gays don't have a way to passively offend straights to the same degree that straights assault the sensibilities of everyone around them.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

At what point did this gay attraction in B&B become the main thrust of the story?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Since faggots and dykes took over Disney and began using it to push the Gay Agenda on peaceful homophobes.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I don't know. I don't think Goofy was ever in the hetero ballpark.

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Malaysia only wanted to cut less than a minute from the movie, which would have made the sexual orientation of the character in question unknown. Disney commendably did not allow this.

Seems you only need a few seconds of gayness to drive all the bigots crazy.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █