Kent Christmas, preachin’ the hate – Twitter screenshot
Far-right conservative preacher Kent Christmas asked God to “loose a Holy judgment” on the upcoming Barbie movie because it is “full of transsexual and transgender and homosexuality.”
Posted on June 25, a now-viral video shows the Tennessee-based Christmas saying, “I curse in the name of the Lord this new Barbie movie that has been released full of transsexual and transgender and homosexuality in the name of the Lord. May God loose a judge, may God loose a Holy judgment. Hallelujah.”
The movie has yet to be released. There is no indication it will be LGBTQ-focused.
The movie features a slew of stars, including Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Hari Nef, Kate McKinnon, Issa Rae, Emma Mackey, Sharon Rooney, Nicola Coughlan, Dua Lipa, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Simu Liu, John Cena, America Ferrara, Will Ferrell, and Helen Mirren.
Director Greta Gerwig says The Wizard of Oz loosely inspired the film. The use of disco music and pink-adorned set leads fans to herald the piece as a “potential camp masterpiece,” PinkNews reported.
This is not the first time the anti-gay Christmas has made far-fetched claims about the LGBTQ community in his 50-year career.
He also claimed he can “immediately tell that someone is gay just by looking at them because the demonic spirit inside of them ‘changes the physical appearance of people.’”
No person affiliated with the movie has expressed annoyance with Christmas’s words.
What has caught the attention of Warner Bros., however, is the film’s ban in Vietnam.
Vietnamese officials banned the movie over a scene with a map “that shows China’s unilaterally claimed territory in the South China Sea,” Reuters reported.
“The U-shaped ‘nine-dash line’ is used on Chinese maps to illustrate its claims over vast areas of the South China Sea, including swathes of what Vietnam considers its continental shelf,” Reuters continued.
“The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,” a Warner Bros. Film Group spokesperson told Variety. “The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the ‘real world.’ It was not intended to make any type of statement.”
Barbie is rated PG-13 and will be released on July 21, 2023, the same day as Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
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Russell T Davies, creator of the British TV series Queer as Folk and the current showrunner of the BBC phenom Doctor Who, says gay society is facing dire peril ever since the presidential election of Donald Trump in November, 2024.
"I'm not being alarmist," Davies told the British newspaper The Guardian. "I'm 61 years old. I know gay society very, very well, and I think we're in the greatest danger I have ever seen."
Davies said the rise in anti-LGBTQ hostility is not limited to the United States, where Trump has signed various anti-LGBTQ executive orders, many geared to diminish and seemingly eradicate the transgender community.
A California appeals court has ruled in favor of a lesbian couple, finding that a baker discriminated against them when she refused to sell them a generic wedding cake.
The case deals with an exception to a loophole that many conservatives believe they had carved out, enabling them to openly discriminate against LGBTQ people in the provision of public goods or services.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who objected to creating a custom-made wedding cake for a gay couple's wedding, finding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had been unfairly prejudiced against the baker's religious beliefs.
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