Stereotypes ain't what they used to be

My brother was visiting with me yesterday.  He is a big fan of South Park, which is not exactly something I am familiar with. He wanted to look at the videos on Youtube. What I saw there was pretty rotgut stuff, but that's not what this little ditty is all about.

One video there was so bad that I just wished my brother would just leave.  So he did.

Not to be done with my brother just yet, one other thing we were looking at was All in the Family sitcom of the seventies.  There was one in which Archie Bunker called England a "fag" country.  A lot of that stuff Archie was saying seemed pretty ridiculous.  But this ain't about Archie Bunker either.  Perhaps Archie Bunker was funny for his time, but that stuff is over 40 years old now.  We have moved on.

My brother left and I got to thinking about a movie I saw recently.  Actually, I had to buy it off Amazon, so now I own the darned thing.  It's the romantic comedy called As Good As It Gets.  I don't watch many of these types of movies.  It was made in the nineties, but I missed it at that time.  I saw something on the web that made me think it was worth watching, and so I had to buy it to see it.  Anyway, it turns out that we ( in this culture ) may well have moved on still more since that time.  There was a type of stereotyping in that movie with respect to the homosexual character in it.  Not like Archie Bunker, but still there.  Evidently, we had made some "progress".

The stereotyping may have helped push a message back then that is seducing the country into accepting the premises the left is trying to sell.  The premise is that homosexuals are just like us.  It used a stereotype of homosexuals being rather passive and sensitive creatures that wouldn't hurt a fly.  If you made a movie like that now, the homosexuals may not approve of it because of the stereotype being used.  But it was useful to them at that time and they probably didn't mind that one bit.  There was this one movie, Basic Instinct, in which the homosexuals didn't like too much and were quite vocal about it.  But we've moved on.  We are so much more "progressive" now.

Now you've got Obama congratulating the first openly "gay" NFL player.  Congratulations for what?

The NFL is a pretty tough business.  Wusses are not going to make it there.  Thus, the new "gay" guy ain't no wuss, like the character "Simon" in the movie As Good As It Gets.  This seems to conflict the stereotypes of the former years mentioned above---but the same ones as we've "grown" from.  As I mentioned before in an earlier post, the leader of the Brownshirts in Nazi Germany was definitely a homosexual.  Not a wuss either.  Not to mention the guy I wrote about yesterday, who didn't fit the stereotypes, and who had effeminate mannerisms, but was also the father of several children.

You can't judge things according to stereotypes.  You never could.  But somehow, what seemed okay before is not so okay today.  And may not be tomorrow.  Something about this is making me suspicious.