Leftists love to play the “I can’t believe you’re even upset about this” game.
Here are the rules.
Leftists say or do something totally outrageous. For example, they say that men should be able to use women’s restrooms, or that maybe children should be forced to learn about homosexuality in public schools.
Conservatives say this stuff is insane.
Leftists feign horror that Republicans should be so upset about these issues. What’s got them so upset? Can’t they just be tolerant? Conservatives are just so angry all the time.
Yes, we’re a bit miffed. We’re miffed that you can’t just leave characters we already known and love alone. Make your own icons, jerks.
Today’s episode of “I can’t believe you’re even upset about this” comes courtesy of Hollywood. On Twitter, the hashtag #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend is trending. This is master-level trolling by leftists: they want to take an iconic American comic book character originally directed at children and teens and make him gay. Moreover, they want to make that character, who is supposed to be an embodiment of 1940s traditional morality, an advocate for 2016 leftist social values. Captain America, for those who don’t read the comic books, was encased in ice while fighting against Hitler. He’s released from the ice, like Rip Van Winkle, decades later – and his old-fashioned love of America and belief in traditional moral values make him an anachronism. He’s described in some of the comics as John McCain in a 30-year-old body.
But now, the left wants Captain America to stop fighting fascism; instead, they want him fighting to protect the world from Christian bakers.
The left knows that Captain America is iconic to three generations of Americans, and so they’re looking to troll the right by conflating his American flag shield with the rainbow flag. And if conservatives protest that Captain America’s traditional mission and personality – which includes protecting traditional families and his own traditional love interests (always women) – is skewed by turning him into a parochial champion for homosexual rights, that makes conservatives bigots. The left wants to simultaneously claim that being homosexual changes nothing about a character, but that it’s desperately important for characters to be homosexual. And they hijack already-popular characters to do it instead of inventing new characters. There’s been no hue and cry about making Iceman from the X-Men gay. But people have a right to expect that the characters with whom they’ve identified for sixty years ought not be changed at the whim of the left.
According to the left, however, popular characters can be shifted on a dime. Leftists will trot out the actor who plays Chris Evans, undoubtedly, to say that it wouldn’t matter if Captain America were gay — that would be great! They’ve already done that with Mark Hamill and Luke Skywalker, which would make his original love triangle with Han Solo and Princess Leia even weirder than it already was. Leftists are now calling for Gillian Anderson to be cast as James Bond. Which makes zero sense, given that Bond’s entire MO is that he’s an ultra-masculine womanizer. A woman picking up and having promiscuous sex with sophisticated men isn’t a spy superhero. That’s a normal night in a dive bar. The rogueish charm of Bond relies on the difference between the sexes: that Bond is a seducer but also, counterintuitively, a man of honor. That conflict doesn’t exist for women.
When it comes to pop culture, the left cheats. They can’t invent a gay Captain United States or a female Jane Blond, because those characters wouldn’t be as popular as Captain America or James Bond. So instead, they’ll try to steal those characters and twist them to fit their agenda. That’s annoying. That’s actually a betrayal of both the characters and the audience – we didn’t buy into Captain America because we wanted to see love scenes with Bucky, and we didn’t buy into James Bond because we want to see some sort of metaphor about female empowerment.
But the left won’t stop. And then they won’t stop complaining if anybody challenges their stupid, irritating, immoral attempts to destroy the characters we loved.