New ABC Show Stages Phony Gay Bullying to Foment Outrage

So let’s say you’re at some restaurant, enjoying your chai tea and veggie burger, reading a worn out copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves, and in a booth nearby you hear a father and son arguing. The conversation gets nasty, as the pop says, “There are solutions to this! No son of mine is going to be gay!”

So what do you do? Well, an ABC show is named exactly that – and the father and son are actually actors fabricating this scene, waiting to see if someone like you will intervene.

It’s a morality experiment: the man berates his son for being gay – and if you don’t do anything – well, you’re just an awful, cowardly homophobe. Later, the performers question bystanders as to why they didn’t interrupt, and of course are judged for lack of involvement.

In a word, this is “riyeht,” which is Vulcan for crap.

I’ll tell you why: these conflicts never happen in public. Look, I pretty much sleep in bars – so I know this. So why build hypothetical situations based on scenes that only happen in corny made-for-TV movies made a decade ago?

Cuz it’s easy: All the network is doing is staging gay bullying stuff because these days, it makes for easy, manufactured outrage. I doubt they’d create a scenario where a tea partier is called a Nazi, or a police officer is labeled a fascist – because that just doesn’t make for a romantic stunt.

But gay is righteous, and gay is easy – so the network creates soapboxes for moronic moralizing, pretending to care – when all they’re really doing is trying to show us how ignorant the average American is.

I’d boycott the network, but I really like Grey’s Anatomy. Derek Shepherd’s love life is so complicated!

And if you disagree with me, you’re worse than Hitler.