The nation’s Southern Baptists, meeting in convention in New Orleans–a town so drenched in sin that actress Kelly McGillis was once prompted to remark, “If I was born there, I’d be dead now”– have decided by overwhelming and indignant vote that the Disney Company of all people should be shunned and chastised for spreading Evil across the land.
As best as I, a mere Presbyterian, can understand the Baptist convention colloquy, this Evil has mostly to do with Disney’s policy of granting health benefits to life partners (or roomies or whatever they’re called) of homosexual employees, allowing homosexuals to buy tickets to Disney theme parks on exactly the same day so they can frolic together around giant plastic Goofys and Mickeys and proclaim the occasion a “gay day,” and because, according to one Baptist couple from Tennessee, Disney uses films like “The Lion King” to promote sinful “nature worship.”
I am not per se in favor of homosexual marriages, but it seems to me that:
1) If homosexual health benefits, “gay days” at theme parks and, horrors, “nature worship” were the only evil being spread across the land, the FBI would be thrilled (though perhaps not as thrilled as it might be were J. Edgar Hoover still with us).
2) Why are the Southern Baptists messing with Disney when they have so much local sin to contend with in the form of all those road house and girly joints I find in such remarkably and suspiciously large numbers in and around Baptist communities in South Texas?
I actually grew up on Disney movies, and, except for having the hell scared out of me at age 4 by “Snow White” when it first came out, I never found Walt & Co. anything but a good influence. Later indulgences in dementia and wayward ways came from reading Thorne Smith novels and watching Mae West/W.C. Fields movies, not from ogling the scantily clad female hippopotamuses in “Fantasia.”
Just now we have Disney making a frolicksome cartoon character out of Quasimodo in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Victor Hugo wrought this character as someone so hideous as to frighten small children. The whole plot turns on his grotesqueness, rendering his love for Esmeralda especially pitiful. But Disney has gone and made Quasimodo CUTE! T’is a wonder they don’t call him “Quasi.”
I’d recommend Disney stuff (except perhaps those frightful dwarfs) to any small child–at least before he or she learned to read. I think it’s not only wonderful but utterly appropriate that such surreal locales as Southern California and Florida are home to Disneyland and DisneyWorld.
What I find more disturbing than Disney’s luring the kiddies into sinful “nature worship” is Disney’s deliberate and relentless intrusion, not upon small town moral goodness, but upon reality.
In Northern Virginia, where I live, we literally had to run Disney out of town when it persisted in trying to build an American history theme park fantasyland amidst some of the most sacred Civil War countryside in the nation.
Disney has just now announced plans to open a retail store of fun Disney products in Harlem. There’s a lot Harlem needs, but I don’t think it includes Dumbo. I can recall going up to Harlem in the ’50s for the wonderful music and the cultural remnants of the fabled Harlem Renaissance. Can you imagine Duke Ellington writing a song that goes, “Hey, let’s take the `A’ train; get us a Goofy doll up in Harlem”?
As the Southern Baptists apparently are unaware, Disney is one of the prime movers behind New York’s campaign to roust the hookers, bums, skells and assorted other sleazebags and all their sin emporia from Times Square (a.k.a. in cop parlance as “The Deuce”) and replace it with Wholesome Family Entertainment for those who come to the Fun Apple to “see a show.”
Disney is planning a huge complex of family hotels, restaurants and theaters that will stage “Broadway shows” that mom, and pop and the kiddies from out there in Mall of America Land will love and be able to see without a single encounter with thigh-highs or the letter “X.” Disney has already established a beachhead there; witness the “Broadway smash” known as “Beauty and the Beast.”
I took in the road show presentation of “Beast” at Washington’s Kennedy Center and have to agree that, yessiree, it sure is lots of fun. It’s mighty fine family fare. It has sky rockety special effects and winsome, charming characters and lollipop music and even cartoon humor (tripping characters and, ha ha, hitting them over the head).
But it’s not a “Broadway show”–not the way “The King and I” and “Master Class” and “Moon Over Buffalo” are Broadway shows. Pleasurable as it might be, “Beast” is a cartoon on stage. It’s a Disney theme park in the middle of Manhattan. If Disney has its way, “The Deuce” will not simply be cleaned up and made safe and reasonably presentable. It’ll be Orlando.
This, on the sacred ground where Legs Diamond played cards and pitched woo with society girls and where gorgeous chorus girls used to flash their glamorous gams and Damon Runyon used to swill bathtub gin and think up short stories about gamblers and horse players.
What next, a Disney “Guys and Dolls” theme park?
