Slippery Creatures Daily Wire host and columnist Matt Walsh usually sticks to transgender issues in his online rants and in his infamous film documentary What Is a Woman?, but he gave those folks a break in order to denounce the latest Disney movie, a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with a Black girl (Halle Bailey) in the lead role. Walsh was upset about the casting because “it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. I mean, if anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should actually be translucent.” Okay, then, let the search for a translucent actress to play the part begin! Walsh does understand that mermaids are creatures of fantasy and don’t have to obey the laws of science, right? He goes on: “She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face. And that would actually be a version of The Little Mermaid that I would watch.” At this point he seems to have drifted into another kind of fantasy altogether, but whatever. Walsh’s shtick is to gin up scientific-sounding, but actually quite absurd, theories to bolster his racist, transphobic, and misogynistic positions. When it comes to gender, the attempt to show that “the binary” is rooted in nature is especially doomed to failure. As ecologist Joan Roughgarden has shown in these pages (and in her books), gender in other species is anything but binary, displaying a riot of possibilities from fish and birds to the higher mammals. As luck would have it, mermaids are especially prone to gender fluidity in folklore—where, by the way, they tend to be mostly green.
Not Welcome A slice of home security footage that went viral shows two Mormon missionaries arriving at a front door somewhere in Indiana and noticing a doormat with the words “Gayest Place in Town,” whereupon they take one look at each other and bolt. The blogosphere loved it because it shows these two soldiers of God dressed in regulation short-sleeved dress shirts, ties, and slacks being scared off by a doormat. The two women who live in the house, who became instant (albeit short-lived) celebrities, told the press that they were just thankful for “the fact that it actually worked! … It was a great investment.” The doormat served to amuse their friends “with the added benefit of keeping religious zealots from knocking on our door to tell us about their god.”
The extremism of the religious Right has gone so far that its proponents are running up against an inconvenient obstacle: the Bible itself. Two recent examples with an LGBT theme:
Making Our Case The American Family Association has come out swinging against Christians who aren’t sufficiently anti-gay and all but admitted that the trouble with these groups is that they’re adhering to a biblical version of Christianity rather than the intolerant one that they prefer. The AFA, which is officially listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, issued a warning about what they called “gay Christianity” and provided a handy list of statements to watch out for, such as: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality even once”; “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about inhospitality and greed, not homosexuality”; “The Bible doesn’t say anything about sexual orientation.” What’s odd is that these are all true statements, and the AFA makes no attempt to refute them. They even produced a 2.5-minute video that consists mostly of LGBT people expounding on the biblical case for gay equality. Of course, the AFA is presenting these views as something to be shunned. Apparently the goal is to alert the flock pre-emptively to any biblical passages that could be interpreted as supporting LGBT rights, or human rights in general. Pay no attention to those passages that preach tolerance and equality; move along!
Banning Books Is Bottomless A school district in Texas actually banned the Bible itself for a time—along with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, The Diary of Anne Frank, and many other titles that were found to be in violation of the Keller district’s guidelines on sex and violence. The Bible was banned for its “sexual content, violence, including rape, murder, human sacrifice,” and so on. Some of the 41 banned books were later reinstated, but the point was made: any book is fair game if you look hard enough for something to be offended by, including the very book whose religious teachings these school boards are ostensibly trying to uphold. Needless to add, the book-banning effort in Keller is part of a movement in red states across the U.S., and the resonance with past episodes of book-banning is obvious. Today such bans are a largely symbolic gesture, since kids find out about sex and gender on the Internet and not at the library. But it has always been about the symbolism. What the Nazis were saying when burning whole libraries was: “If we can burn your books, we can burn you.” And that’s a sobering message in any age.
