Christian Group Protests ‘Gaying’ of Beloved Children’s Story

Anne with an E trailer on Netflix
Netflix/YouTube

The Colson Center for Christian Worldview has denounced a new TV version of the 1908 children’s story Anne of Green Gables for pushing a pro-LGBT agenda antithetical to the original story.

The classic children’s novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery is set in the late 19th century and tells of an 11-year-old Canadian orphan who is adopted by a brother and sister on Prince Edward Island.

The eighteen-part Netflix series, titled Anne with an E and produced and broadcast by CBC in Canada, has just begun its second season.

Given “the non-stop campaign to normalize the LGBT lifestyle,” write Eric Metaxas and Anne Morse in an article titled “Anne of Rainbow Gables? The LGBT Agenda and a Children’s Classic,” it should come as “no surprise that the most recent version introduces several homosexual characters.”

The series does not take long to introduce the LGBT agenda, the authors note, as in episode three, Anne, her friend Diana Berry, and a boy named Cole attend a “queer soiree” featuring men wearing heavy makeup and dressed as women as well as women dressed as men.

They are there, the authors note, to honor the memory of Gertrude — the “partner” of Diana’s Great-Aunt Josephine. The lesbian relationship serves to introduce Anne to another sort of “marriage.”

When Diana makes the mistake of telling Anne that the love affair between the two women was “unnatural,” she is led to enlightenment by the boy Cole who explains that love is love.

“If your aunt lived her life feeling … that she was broken, defective, or unnatural, and one day she met someone that made her realize that wasn’t true,” Cole says, “shouldn’t we be happy for her?”

Cole later confesses to Aunt Josephine that he thinks he is “like you and Gertrude,” to which the woman replies: “You have a life of such joy before you.”

After this, Anne sends the message home by asking another character: “How can there be anything wrong with a life if it’s spent with a person you love?”

The authors at the Colson Center are not the only people disturbed by the gay-themed Anne with an E.

As one viewer wrote on the Facebook page of a Christian film review site, “The gay agenda completely ruined a perfectly heartwarming and uplifting story.”

“Homosexuality is the main theme and appears in every nook and cranny of this season’s episodes,” another reviewer wrote. “If I were gay, I would be insulted by all the gross generalizations about homosexuality and the overt and repetitive presentation of the gay lifestyle as being superior to that of heterosexuals.”

Even progressive reviewer Amy Glynn could not help trashing the “woke” version of Anne of Green Gables for its clumsy and anachronistic imposition of the gay agenda.

“This show tramples the source material in a way that dilutes and arguably betrays the protagonist,” Glynn wrote Monday, with its “incredibly unsubtle overlay of 2018 sensibilities.”

The introduction of an open lesbian feminist was “patently to provoke a frenzy of bigotries and cruelties to be overcome so the audience can get a social justice primer,” she laments.

“It’s not postmodern, it’s not sardonic, it’s not playful, it’s not transgressive,” she says. “It’s a ham-handed dissertation on ‘feminism’ and ‘diversity’ and how only the terribly, terribly outcast can ever understand when something is a good idea.”

Anne with an E is, in the end, “sanctimonious twaddle that would have made the book’s author break out in hives,” she writes.

Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter .

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