Last week, Food Network host Sandra Lee was at the “Out 100” Party pushing for equality:
Also present at the party was the next First Girlfriend of New York, Ms. Sandra Lee, companion of Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Top of mind for her that night was moving New York towards marriage equality. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that we’re all happy, we’re all healthy, we all insulate and support each other in every place that we can. And marriage equality is part of that.” At Out 100 Party, Celebrating Amid the Despair [WSJ]
Today Lee was back on the most aggressively anti-LGBT show on mainstream television, “The 700 Club,” cooking up some Christmas goodies with cohost Terry Meeuwsen:
So what do we think about this? On one hand: Lee isn’t a political figure, and it’s understandable that she’d want to push her work out to the masses. “700 Club” viewers decorate. “700 Club” viewers surely enjoy the Christmas, like a lot. So from a publicity standpoint, the gig is easy to understand, regardless of ideology.
But the thing is: “The 700 Club” is unlike any other show on television. If it were merely a conservative program, that’d be another roll of wax paper entirely. But this is the show where respect for gay lives and loves goes to die. Where any LGBT right is already scripted as a wrong. Where objectivity in terms of marriage equality means always looking at both sides of the coin, just as long as the coin’s head and tail both emit the same “protect marriage” rhetoric. Where the cooking segments might benefit from Sandra Lee’s semi-homemade expertise, but where the show’s much more prominent “culture war” aspects whip up anti-gay fears more aggressively than any Kitchen-Aid product ever could.
Should our self-declared allies (especially one whose dating New York’s Democratic, gay-supporting governor) really be lending credence to this kind of an operation?
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***Reminder of how Meeuwsen and Robertson responded to the Prop 8 ruling. “‘The homosexuals™ want to destroy the church and they want to destroy marriage'”:
*Oh, and about the guy who Meeuwsen, at 3:58, says she’s “with”: So about that guy in the ‘groom’ tee… [G-A-Y]
