We just finished watching the DVR of this (well, supervenusfreak finished watching. I finished listening from the computer.).
I have to say that I am nowhere near as good a person as the gay fathers she stayed with. She would have been OUT on the porch within an hour here. I could just not BELIEVE how desperately she just clung to that kernel of what she’d been taught about gays and lesbians, in the face of direct and compelling evidence otherwise. She appeared to want everything both ways…foster children finding enough adoptive parents and no gays or lesbians adopting foster children, even though she saw and was told by an advocate for the foster children that there just weren’t enough man/woman couples adopting.
Every time someone questioned her position, she saw it as a personal attack! To paraphrase Jack Nicholson, she couldn’t handle the truth. At all.
I seriously would have had serious problems dealing with her. Like, “get out of my goddamn house, you stubborn bitch!” problems. Those guys are SAINTS!
Thirty Days - just wanted to make this searchable…ignore this
I was a co-founder and co-president of a Gay Straight Alliance at my high school, in rural North Carolina. That episode brought up some bad memories, but the best way to deal with it is to realize that “you can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into.”
I’d like to sit her down for a nice hour with Lewis Black. See here.
I can’t remember the last time I spent so much time shouting at the TV. “I believe this is wrong,” with no reasons to back it up. And she just could not get that gays who are fighting to be parents don’t trample on her parenting rights, but her fight to ban them most definitely tramples on theirs.
I was disappointed that nobody pointed out to her that straight parents also take away kids from their spouses (per her screed to the lesbian mom whose spouse took off with their kid), and that being gay is not a choice. And to the woman whose gay dad talked sex at the breakfast table and took her to sex shops: so if he’d been straight, that would have been OK? No, he was a perv to expose her to that stuff, and his being gay was irrelevant. And about the “mom/dad household” thing: so kids of single parents should just be taken away? About the kids being teased/bullied at school: Kids aren’t teased/bullied about other things?
I’d like to know whether her kids are adopted because she and her husband couldn’t conceive. If so, shouldn’t she have just accepted God’s will, just as she thinks gay people should accept that they can’t conceive?
Man, I was mad. I don’t think they’ve ever had a show turn out so badly.
I was disheartened that she couldn’t see the difference between gays and lesbians seeking to have the same rights as straight adoptive and foster couples, and people working to make that illegal. “You vote your way and I’ll vote my way, and we’ll see who wins.” (Paraphrasing.)
I thought that when she was feeling most defensive, and saying things like (paraphrasing) “I can’t believe there’s a whole army of people fighting for the opposite of what I believe,” it might have been helpful to point out to her that this is exactly how many gay people feel about society as a whole.
At one point she seemed willing to at least question whether she might be wrong, but then she went back to unquestioning acceptance of her religious prejudices.
Oh well, you can’t win them all. Still, I can’t help thinking that in a generation or so, blind prejudice against gay people will be mostly a thing of the past.
I have to say that 30 Days is a great show, and Morgan Spurlock is brilliant. It’s the only thing I watch on FX.
As I’ve said, I am not a good person. I soooo eagerly look forward to watching all these people who are like this woman deny, deny, deny that they ever felt this way in 30 years or so because homophobia will occupy the same shelf on society’s Trophy Case of Shame as racism does today.
I watch this last night. The whole episode made me feel pukey. Not “Gay people make me sick” pukey but “I cannot believe how indignant this lady is” pukey.
I want to go live in that family! It looks fantastic!
What was up with the kid(s?)'s birth family hanging around? The mom even had one older daughter in tow. Is that normal?
But the crazy thing about racism is that at least they knew that race wasn’t a choice. That kind of makes concessions for blacks necessary. While segregation wasn’t a good thing at all, at least it was an attempt to deal with a problem. Homosexuality appears to be a choice to a lot of gay-bashers. If someone chooses to do something “wrong” then they don’t have any reason to have any rights, right? Not my feelings, btw, but it just seems to work that way. I seriously wonder if we’ll ever make it that far.
This is seriously off-topic for the forum, but we will. It’s happening now. It’s going to be gradual, but it’s going to be inevitable. In 30 years, at the most, we’ll be where racial relations were in the 80s, I think…when there was still a lot of racial tension under the surface, but it was increasingly socially unacceptable to actually voice or demonstrate racist thought and actions.
I’ve actually been thinking about this episode the last few days. Now that the initial anger’s burned down to embers, I actually feel sorry for Katie.
If I think back to her reactions in the episode, the tears and sobbing breakdowns whenever the tenets of her faith vis-a-vis homosexuality were questioned, it looks a lot like a person who is deathly afraid of questioning any part of her faith, because she’s desperately afraid that her faith isn’t strong enough to survive that questioning. It’s not so much arrogance as it is fear.
That, combined with the apparent fact that this woman has NEVER MET anyone who didn’t agree with her on this subject before, makes me realize that her reactions are as much the result of culture shock as they are of an arrogant self-centeredness. The fact that she’s just factually wrong doesn’t really redound to her as fault…it’s all she’s known.
I think the episode is valuable, in that it really smacks it home that this IS the rank & file of the forces that are arrayed against gay rights and same-sex marriage and gay adoption…people who really did NOT reason themselves into their opinions on it, and who actually don’t KNOW why they believe that, other than because that’s what they were told.
I don’t think you’re far off the mark here. The fact that she couldn’t put together a reasonable argument really had her on the defensive. And I think she was having a hard time reconciling her beliefs (gay is evil!!) with what she was witnessing (gay people are pretty normal). That’s got to be emotionally draining.
I think it would be interesting to check back with her in a year to see if getting out of the defensive mindset and allowing reason to simmer for a while leads to some softening. Probably not, a month of exposure (with the culture shock she was experiencing) probably isn’t long enough to penetrate her sheilds. And she’s probably back in her cultural cocoon where she will have her prejudices reinforced. But who knows, maybe a seed was planted that will eventually grow.
Just watched it, and I found myself yelling at the TV. I felt like a fool yelling at someone who could never hear me, but I guess it’s the mark of compelling television.
The birth parents didn’t have the resources to deal with the special needs kid, and these saint-like adoptive parents not only were great for him, they made sure he saw his parents and siblings.
I got the impression that this woman set some ground rules - that the beliefs of the Mormon church were off-limits. I don’t know enough about the LDS position on gays, or if they just have the same Leviticus-derived anti-gay Christian position.
The LDS church sent whole squadrons of ground troops to California when that state had Prop 22 on the ballot in 2000. And they were not there to link arms with the Human Rights Campaign and fight for equality.
The series has had an amazing track record, but you can’t win them all. This must have been a tough one for Morgan to present, knowing that the experiment had failed.
Actually, I’m looking forward to her denying it, and then having witnesses call her on her BS and having to slink out of the sight, hearing, and scent range of civilized people.
You’re assuming he had a preferred outcome. An experiment that doesn’t yield the expected results isn’t necessarily a failure.
I’m wondering if he has considered doing opposite pairs of shows: after this, sending a gay person to live with an LDS family. It could be the same people in the first show, or a different set.
I’ve just been looking at the show’s entry on IMDb, and I think I completely missed the second season, and half of the shows in the first. This is what I get for never watching FX. Oh, well.
I know in other episodes, there was a clear change for the person entering the setup, but not here. That said, I wouldn’t qualify this as a failure. There a lots of people like me out there—not gay, but sympathetic and seeing it as an issue like slavery (i.e. an untenable oppression that the government supports). So if nothing else, the episode is a reminder that others are deeply entrenched in biases they’ve never questioned and will continue to refuse to question (beyond looking it up in the Bible, I mean). These are the same people to whom the importance of the separation of church and state is undesirable.
I’m not concerned whether she saw the light; I bet a lot of people who were on the fence couldn’t imagine aligning themselves with her ignorance. It’s a vicarious thing…you ask yourself ‘If I were living there…’ and the answer is that the gay couple did right by their kids, so what’s not to support?
ETA: I discovered that you can download episodes from Amazon/unbox from seasons 1/2 to watch on your computer. They only cost a couple bucks each ($1.50 IIRC) and you ‘own’ them—they don’t disappear after viewing. I highly recommend: Minimum Wage, Immigration, and Outsourcing.
I’ve downloaded this but haven’t watched it yet. From reading the reviews the woman sounds diabolical far moreso than the Phelpses (who for all their press are just nuts with no political power), for (and again I haven’t watched the episode) it sounds like she’s saying at the end “They’re good parents, they do nothing wrong, their kids are much better off with them than in foster care… but I’d see the family split up and the kids sent off to foster care and their lives ruined just strictly to please my own narrow view of how things should be.” I hope I’m wrong.
GLAAD is furious at the episode, and while I often think GLAAD is just being pissy and thin-skinned in their complaints this one sounds a lot more justified. Apparently they have a Paul Cameron fellating numbskull spout the usual “kids in gay parent families are far more likely to be molested/abused/flayed alive for satanic ritual party games” crap (that has NO reliable evidence at all and in fact reliable studies REFUTE this) but he doesn’t have equal time for somebody to go MY COUSIN VINNIE with “everything that guy just said is bullshit… [and here’s why]”, which IS important. I can’t believe that there hasn’t been more 20/20 or Anderson Closet or Dateline type shows showing the lies and evils of the Paul Cameron/Family Research Institute crowd and, just as importantly, the people who unquestioningly cite their research.
Anyway, apologies for posting before watching the show. Will come back with tiramisu and Sprite after watching it.
I was seconds from spitting at the TV when I saw this episode. She had nothing but her own sheep-like ideas about what should/shouldn’t be, that she couldn’t see past them to SAVE THE LIFE OF A CHILD. That’s ignorance that can usually only be overcome by the proper application of the precise amount of high-order explosives. :mad:
I viewed her with a blend of sadness/pity/frustration. I think the earlier poster was spot on in that she wasn’t fighting the concept of gayness inasmuch as she was mentally pinned against the dogma of her faith and was finding no way to reconcile the conflict. Admit her church and the bible are wrong? That just wasn’t going to happen.
The LDSers I’ve known have been nice, friendly people who I get on well with–but their unyielding literalism with which they define their beliefs, constantly vetted through the filter of their church and community, is surpassed only by the Jehovas Witnesses from what I’ve seen. It is very much a mono-culture of beliefs.
She is returning to a community that, even had she left the experience with an open mind and new perspectives, will completely trample any deviations from orthodoxy that she would have otherwise explored.