Wintery Knight

…integrating Christian faith and knowledge in the public square

New study: pro-gay television shows have shifted public opinion on gay marriage

Life Site News reports.

Excerpt:

Ipsos MediaCT, a global market research company, have just released a study…

According to the report, 18 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 said that television has directly contributed to their increasing support for same-sex “marriage.”

That’s nearly double the number (10 percent) who reported television had increased their opposition to marriage redefinition.

“Based on this data, I think we can conclude that TV has, at least in part, moved the needle of public opinion to see same-sex marriage in a positive way,” Ben Spergel, Senior Vice President and Head of TV Insights at Ipsos MediaCT said in a statement.

“With everything from higher profile portrayals of gay characters, to celebrity support of gay marriage, to last year’s groundbreaking endorsement by President Obama, we are seeing a shift in our culture that is being influenced by popular culture,” he said.

Last month, liberal writer Andrew O’Hehir wrote an article for Salon crediting the American movement toward homosexual acceptance to television shows like “Will and Grace,”"Roseanne,” “The Real World,” “Ellen DeGeneres,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Modern Family,” and “Glee.”

“From ‘Soap’ to Ellen DeGeneres to Richard Hatch on ‘Survivor’ to the macho male couple who won season 4 of ‘The Amazing Race,’” O’Hehir wrote, “televisual images of sexual diversity have gradually moved away from victimology and ‘gay best friend’ stereotypes toward a ‘normalizing vision’of LGBT culture.”

“While the startling public shift on gay marriage – something few people of my generation, straight or gay, thought they’d ever see — is not solely the product of TV, it represents the ultimate fulfillment of TV’s vision of sexual equality,” O’Hehir added.

Support for same-sex “marriage” is on the rise in the United States. Recent polls show more than half of Americans support redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, and several states now allow gay nuptials in defiance of federal law.

One reason I don’t have a TV in my house is because television is used as a way to change people’s minds without making rational arguments or showing evidence. It’s easy enough for gay-friendly Hollywood to make TV shows where all the gay characters are funny, hard-working, faithful and moral. But that doesn’t reflect what studies tell us about gay relationships. They are non-exclusive, short-lived, have higher rates of violence and abuse, etc.

If gay marriage were to become legal, then marriage would would no longer be permanent, faithful, or child-centered, as this gay activist recently explained.

It’s a no-brainer that (homosexuals) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. . . . Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there—because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie.

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally. . . . I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three. . . . And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.

The purpose of gay marriage is to normalize and celebrate any arrangements that makes adults happy, whether or not it provides for the needs of the children. Evidence from large-scale studies shows that gay relationships are not as good for children as natural marriage. But people who watch TV and don’t read studies will have their minds changed by TV, and then they will vote. And children not yet born will have to grow up without mothers and fathers because of it.

In a very real sense, stupidity and selfishness are destroying the next generation of children. It’s not just the crushing 17 trillion dollar debt being run up by selfish adults for their entitlements. It’s not just that our public schools are insulated from reform by powerful politically connected teacher unions. It’s not just that we liberalized divorce laws so that women can divorce men when they are not “happy” any more. It’s not just that we force employers to ship jobs overseas by raising their corporate taxes and burdening them with nonsense regulations. It’s not just that government pays irresponsible women to have babies out of wedlock. It’s not just that we abort the next generation of taxpayers because we can’t be bothered to get married and make a home for them before having sex. Now, we have to go beyond all that . We have to go even further. Now we have to formalize and normalize the complete supremacy of selfish adults over the needs of children. God help us all.

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Black-listed “2016″ grossed more than all 15 “Best Documentary” Oscar nominees combined

The Daily Caller reports.

Excerpt:

“2016: Obama’s America,” a conservative documentary, raked in more money than all the 15 films being considered for the Best Documentary Academy Award combined. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Monday announced “2016″ won’t even get a shot to win a nomination for the award.

Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of “Schindler’s List” and “2016,” blames Hollywood’s “bias against anything from a conservative point of view” for the Academy Award snub, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The film, directed by conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, earned $33.4 million nationwide, making it the highest-grossing documentary of the year.

The Independent Journal explains who is responsible.

Excerpt:

The left-wing media keep pretending there is no “gray-list” in Hollywood, but it’s crystal clear that there is a kind of reverse McCarthyism in the ranks of the entertainment elite. D’Souza’s smash-hit biographical film about Barack Obama is the second-highest grossing political documentary of all time, taking backseat only to Michael Moore’s anti-Bush conspiracy film Fahrenheit 9/11. But forget about that being enough to qualify 2016 for nomination at the upcoming Oscars.

Professed communist and multi-millionaire Michael Moore is currently the Academy Award Governor for documentaries, just for a bit of perspective (can anyone imagine a conservative like Dinesh D’Souza in that role?). Since D’Souza’s film is a fact-driven critique of Barack Obama’s past, rather than a herald of the ‘triumphant’ Obama narrative (complete with soaring gospel hymnals), no one expected 2016 to make the Oscar short-list for documentaries. But its erasure from history at the February 26th Oscars will be merely another confirmation of Hollywood’s left-wing bias.

[...]Today’s left-wing bias can easily be seen regarding 2016 by the wide gulf in reviews between the critics and the audience on the popular film review site Rotten Tomatoes. While critics gave 2016a dismal 27% review, the audience mostly enjoyed the film at 75%. This is one of the widest disparities this user has ever seen on the website. By comparison, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was liked by 83% of critics and 69% of audiences; while Al Gore’s discredited Oscar-winning flick An Inconvenient Truth garnered 93% positive critical review to an audience approval clip of 75%.

Had you heard about 2016? I blogged about it several times, and Reformed Seth sent me this interview with Dinesh D’Souza, where you can learn more. He’s being interviewed by Stanley Fish in that interview.

Should you be giving a dime of your money to Hollywood? I almost never go to the movie theater, except to see movies like Expelled, the Great Raid, Bella and 2016. You can purchase a DVD of 2016 from Amazon.com.

Related posts

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New study: Children exposed to sex in films have sex earlier and have more partners

Dina sent me this story from the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

Children who watch films with a high sexual content tend to lose their virginity earlier and have more partners, a study has found.

Not only are they more promiscuous, they are also more likely to engage in risky sex by not using condoms.

The six-year study of more than 1,200 teens refers to sexual content in films.

[...]The study on the effect on younger teenagers of sex in films was published in Psychological Science, the peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Researchers from Dartmouth College, an Ivy League university in the US, surveyed 684 top-grossing movies from 1998 to 2004, and then coded them for sexual content.

A film such as Eyes Wide Shut would be coded highly, while Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King would get a low coding. Although some of the films had 18-ratings, they could have been seen by younger children on DVDs at home.

The researchers then recruited 1,228 youngsters aged between 12 and 14, and each was asked which films on the list they had seen from a number of different collections of 50 that were randomly selected.

Six years later the same participants were surveyed to find out how old they were when they became sexually active and how risky their sexual behaviour might have been.

The results indicated that exposure to sexual content in movies at an early age is likely to influence adolescents’ sexual behaviour.

Previously, I have argued that early premarital sex and a high number of premarital sex partners are independent risk factors for marital instability. Parents should therefore be careful about what their children are exposed to in films, if they want their children to have a happy marriage.

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Can the Democrats be trusted to protect our national security?

A Washington Post editorial by three Republican senators highlights a persistent problem.

Excerpt:

Espionage is a dangerous business often seen only through a Hollywood lens. Yet the real-world operations, and lives, that inspire such thrillers are highly perishable. They depend on hundreds of hours of painstaking work and the ability to get foreigners to trust our government.

Sitting in a prison cell in Pakistan is one of those foreigners who trusted us. Shakil Afridi served as a key informant to the United States in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. This brave physician put his life on the line to assist U.S. efforts to track down the most-wanted terrorist in the world, yet our government left him vulnerable to the Pakistani tribal justice system, which sentenced him to 33 years for treason. The imprisonment and possible torture of this courageous man — for aiding the United States in one of the most important intelligence operations of our time — coincides with a deeply damaging leak in another case.

The world learned a few weeks ago that U.S. intelligence agencies and partners had disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to blow up a civilian aircraft using an explosive device designed by an affiliate in Yemen. This disclosure revealed sources and methods that could make future successes more difficult to achieve. The public release of information surrounding such operations also risks the lives of informants and makes it more difficult to maintain productive partnerships with other intelligence agencies. These incidents paint a disappointing picture of this administration’s judgment when it comes to national security.

[...]The problem stems in part from the media’s insatiable desire for real-world information that makes intelligence operations look like those of filmmakers’ imaginations. That is understandable, but this hunger is fed by inexcusable contributions from current and former U.S. officials.

For example, why did the Obama administration hold a conference call May 7 with a collection of former government officials, some of whom work as TV contributors and analysts, to discuss the foiled bomb threat? In doing so, the White House failed to safeguard sensitive intelligence information that gave us an advantage over an adversary. Broadcasting highly classified information notifies every enemy of our tactics and every current and future partner of our inability to provide them the secrecy that often is the difference between life and death.

[...]When they leave Capitol Hill, former members of Congress and their staff are, by law, prohibited from petitioning their former congressional colleagues for up to two years. Yet nothing restricts former security officials from using their government contacts and experience to provide live commentary on breaking news stories.

Furthermore, nothing limits current officials from using their media contacts to control a story — or to even promote a big-budget movie. We were shocked to learn that the White House has also leaked classified details of the bin Laden raid to Hollywood filmmakers, including the confidential identities of elite U.S. military personnel.

The authors:

Dan Coats, Richard Burr and Marco Rubio, all Republicans, represent Indiana, North Carolina and Florida, respectively, in the U.S. Senate and are members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Here’s my take: Democrats want to equalize influence between our country and countries like Iran, China and North Korea. One way they can do this is by undermining our ability to defend our interests abroad. It’s all part of the leftist dream of making everyone “equal” so that there are no disagreements. In a very real sense, leftists are responsible for enabling the human rights abuses and purges that go on in countries like Iran, China and North Korea. They don’t really think that things like shooting pro-Democracy protestors (Iran), coerced abortion (China) and executing Christians for distributing Bibles (North Korea), etc. should be opposed with American influence.

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Good Christian Bitches: why Christians should not support Hollywood

From Newsbusters.

Excerpt:

At the same time Washington was ablaze with outrage at the idea that Rush Limbaugh insulted a woman as a “slut,” ABC premiered a new Sunday night show called “GCB” – shortened from “Good Christian Bitches.” Limbaugh apologized. ABC displays no such contrition. They insulted only those Christians. In the midst of this trashy debut, ABC promoted a new sitcom coming in April titled “Don’t Trust The B—- in Apartment 23.”

ABC advertised the debut of “GCB” with a photo of actress Kristin Chenoweth in a choir robe cut way above the knee, as if such a thing exists. “Love One Another,” it read, dripping in sarcasm. That’s Hollywood’s definition of a “good Christian.”

Chenoweth plays Carlene Cockburn, the wealthy “queen bitch,” who routinely quotes Bible verses with venom on the show. When her realtor friend won’t help her ruin the lead character, Amanda, Carlene threatens her business: “Read Job 1:21, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” She launches wicked plots while the auto shop puts a “John 3:16″ decal on her car. She tells her fellow plotters “God hates failure.”

Time TV critic James Poniewozik protested “I have a hard time believing that anyone will see themselves insulted by GCB: its target is not Christians but phonies.” Not so. There are certainly Christian hypocrites that can make for great grist in entertainment. But this show offers the viewing public no authentic Christians at all.

Notice how the Hollywood people think that being a Christian means refusing to judge immorality, and that everyone who takes Biblical morality seriously is to be attacked as a hypocrite. It’s good to be clear on this. That’s their view of Christianity.

Frankly, I try to see one movie at most in theaters per year. I want to give as little as possible to be in Hollywood, because to me Hollywood is mostly populated by Roman Polanski types and supporters of Roman Polanski types.

What frustrates me is that Christians are the ones providing these people with revenues. We shouldn’t be shoveling money to these anti-Christian bigots in Hollywood, and pastors should be speaking out about it. Frankly, I think that we shouldn’t be spending anything near the amount of money we spend on entertainment – I don’t even have a TV, and I certainly don’t have cable. We need to be more careful how we spend our money. The way we spend our money is like a painting we produce for God – it ought to reflect our values and be constructive and helpful to him.

UPDATE: Luanne posts an another Newsbusters article on Facebook.

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