It’s called Irreplaceable and it’s about…the traditional family. The only allowable kind of family. The family you must have, or face an eternity in Hell after the bigots make your live miserable now.
Watch the trailer and cringe. They start of with a cute little kid talking about the importance of love, and then they start talking about the horrors of modern life: divorce, gay marriage, temporary marriage, single parents, out-of-wedlock births, and they counter it with how much they love the traditional family.
Hey, I grew up in a traditional family, and I have a traditional family — there’s nothing wrong with that. But somehow I can be happy with my lifestyle without insisting that everyone else must live exactly the same way.
One unusual thing here though: yes, go ahead and read the youtube comments. Everyone is calling them out on Focus on the Patriarchy’s hypocrisy. I predict this movie will bomb spectacularly. FotF is one of the most hated organizations around.
Well, I didn’t have that kind of family to begin with, which I suppose is totally my fault, so hell it is!
Oh, I like this comment:
Good advice, that.
I didn’t think The Passion of the Christ would do well (who’d want to see a snuff film for God-botherers?), but it was a hit. So I won’t count on my instincts about this one’s box office potential.
However, even if it does bomb commercially, it may still serve the purpose its makers wanted: as a rallying cry and as emotional reinforcement for fellow bigots. With marriage equality sweeping through state after state, and the potential for the SCOTUS to bring it nationwide (as Scalia has been predicting), they need some bucking up.
All it’s actually doing is putting focus on just how much of a hate group they are, which is not altogether a bad thing.
I expect they’re going to count on the Moral Majority strategy: the more the movie is reviled for being dreck, the more the embattled and dreadfully persecuted Christian hard right in the US will be pressured by their churches into going to see it at paid screenings, to boost its earnings. It’s the movie version of buying 40,000 copies of Glenn Beck’s novel so it makes the bestseller list – of Christian media, anyway. They’ll probably have ads with copy about lions and Romans or something.
The trailer does not give any real clue that this is a “Christian” film which is coming out of a propaganda mill. Instead, it tries to look like a secular documentary concerned with finding a solution which will help the world and “mend broken hearts” and decrease poverty, violence, and injustice. Who could be against that?
As Steven Pinker points out, though, the world today, as a whole, has much less poverty, violence, and injustice than it had in the glorious past when — presumably — all families were “traditional” families or, at least, the traditional family was the standard ideal towards which we all strode. That’s a disconnect.
What is castigated as a selfish concern with the individual self can also be seen as a primarily positive development, one where people discover what is right for them, regardless of the “traditions.” If seeking love is a universal, then wouldn’t it also be included in individualism? The little boy who explains at the beginning of the clip that ‘families are about love’ could, in theory, have been the introduction to a film encouraging adoption within gay marriage. Or is that not real love because it’s not “traditional?”
Yeah, we know where the film is going to go: fundamentalist Christianity. But interesting that the people marketing it seem to have thought it wiser to be rather oblique on that part. I wonder if they chose a narrator with a British voice in order to sound more scholarly and/or objective to its audience, a sort of counter to the refined accents of Richard Dawkins?
You would that FoF would have learned to turn comments on their videos OFF. But then, that presumes they are capable of learning.
I’m guessing that opening bit with the little boy is about as real as, well as Jesus. That’s an adult perspective on family, love, and death, and I can’t imagine a boy that age putting the those things together like that. His expression at the end seems to be anxiously looking for approval that he has said it right this time, suggesting to me that he’s been told what to say.
Good thing we can add other kinds of families to our understanding of what families are without replacing the kind that is and will continue to be the dominant form.
A friend of mine has that on a bumper sticker. :)
barbyau:
Is it really the dominant form anymore, though? I think the reason for the major panic attacks is that changes are sticking, and people are becoming more and more accepting of families in all manner of forms. Family is what you make it.
CAUTION!!! I see a dangerous possibility that SOME might go see it, just to see how wrong they are. I’ll be very careful to not yield to this gruesome temptation. I’ve seen trailers for this before other movies, and each time I was thoroughly disgusted to see the “Focus on the Family” logo at the end of it. I promise I will NOT see this, risky any of my $$ going to them. Promise!
I saw the trailer for it when I took Girl, Boy, and FSiL to see The Desecration of The Hobbit and as soon as I saw ‘Focus on the Fascists’ as the ones sponsoring the right-wing anti-human propaganda I started to laugh. I plan to avoid the Christmas rush and start hating it now.
I have noticed that almost any organization that has Family or Freedom in the name tends to be a right-wing neo-fascist organization.
Just a useless observation.
Why is it that most of the organizations with the word ‘Family’ in their names, generally stand for hatred, bigotry, and things I wouldn’t want to expose my own children to? I can’t be the only one who resents the misappropriation of the word family.
I 100% guarantee there will be no “learning from history” in this movie, even though they talk about it in the trailer. Nor will they “search the world for answers” because there’s only one answer they want to find: that the heterosexual, fundamentalist Christian, patriarchal, married-for-life nuclear family is the only true kind of family, and everything else will lead to ruin. And when they can’t find that answer, because it’s bullshit, they’ll just lie and pretend they did.
PZ told us long ago (before the elevator thing, even!) to replace the word “family” in any organization with “patriarchy”.
@Jim Phynn: It’s practically a law that “family” organizations are hate groups, and yeah, it’s irritating. I’m sure there are plenty of friendly group organizers who are afraid of using the word “family” in their name because of the common association. I’d certainly be worried about it.
The one that maybe half of all people have.
The divorce rate is 50%. 40% of all children are born to single mothers.
And the fundies stats are worse than the general population. They have a higher divorcr rate than other grojups.
Which they earned the hard way.
Focus on Hating Everyone has had several rounds of layoffs and their loot intake is way down. They even pushed James Dobson out to try to tone down the hate.
Dobson’s so called advice was always a recipe for disaster.
A friend of mine has still never quite forgiven me for the time she and I drove up through Colorado Springs proudly displaying the bumper sticker Sally Strange describes.
(I like the part where someone says “Marriage is not an agreement, it is a vow.” I wanted very badly to say “Marriage in biblical times was not a vow, it was a transaction. Monetary value in exchange for a woman’s unruptured hymen.”)
I hope a film student sees this film and decides to make a counter film. One that tells stories about a woman who refused to get a divorce for religious reasons and winds up getting killed by her husband, children being kicked out of their homes for being an abomination to God (ie gay or having a birth defect), and a family who had so many children to fulfill God’s demands that they are driven into poverty and need to go to food banks just to have enough to eat.
The divorce rate is 50%
“Irreplaceable.”
They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.
Oh for the good old days, when divorce was illegal and half of all marriages ended when the husband abandoned his wife and children. The nuclear family is an artificial garbage institution that falls apart as soon as just a little outside pressure is applied. The dirty secret of the “traditional” family is that it only existed because the social democratic wave (New Deal etc) created the economic conditions where it could survive.
The “good old days” of one man, one woman, married for life, raising only their kids, has always been a myth for lots of people. The immediate post WW2 era is a good example. A lot of dads didn’t come back from WW2. A lot of couples didn’t remain faithful to each other while they were separated, resulting in “illegitimate” children, many of whom didn’t find out the person they thought was their father wasn’t until years or even decades later, if they found out at all. Other folks ended up in blended families when their mothers remarried or married people other than the biological father, while yet others were raised by single mothers, or by other family members when mom couldn’t go it alone.
It was a hit for the same reason the Saw films were. Humans are a predator species. We have sadism in our blood. I grew up in a fifteen century old religion that revolves around the cultivation of human suffering. That and hating women. Oh, and obsession with sex.
So if you can torture women for having sex, you’ve scored a hat trick.
Or, it could be just as popular as Expelled
Yeah, as a low-libido woman who’s a survivor of violence, @25 is a list of the three things most likely to make me not watch a show.
Caine at 11: When you come right down to it though, the only thing they want is for the gay option gone. Multiple divorces? Single parents? These are things they complain about but do nothing to eliminate. And if they are going to tolerate those things when they want all other options removed, I’m counting these versions count as a version they can live with.
I stopped reading right there (purely for the lulz).
But then I watched the trailer. Well, I suppose it least the film will have some nice scenery. Avebury just doesn’t get enough international exposure.
@Sastra #6:
The narrator’s accent is Australian, not British.
But what is the evolutionary reason for people liking Ben Stiller movies?
Unless we are sadists and masochists by nature?
(CaitieCat, as a woman who never suffered from violence, items on that list usually make me not watch shows too)
Count on the Fox bots hyping this movie as well as any real or perceived criticism.
Jim Phynn/Bronze Dog:
I’ve noticed that this does not hold true in Spanish, even when the organization is US based.
Desarrollo Integral De La Familia was a great organization in Portland when I was there.
I hope they include a section that details to correct way to abuse your children and bring them closer to god.
if the statistics about divorce and families are correct, I see no reason to doubt them., I also grew up in a traditional family, divorced single mother with an absent or uninvolved father.
I don’t think they are using the word traditional correctly I think the name they need to use is nuclear family instead. As far as I can see through our history mixed up families were much more likely than “Ossie & Harriet” nuclear families for the majority of people.
I will not be watching that trailer either!
uncle frogy
Meanwhile in Australia one of our staunch conservative senators rages against non traditional family values although the comments on the article are mainly good.
Tim@24
Yup! I’m one of those kids. I was told that my father was dead. In my thirties, I found out that he was still alive and that my mother had been married to the guy that I grew up thinking was my grandfather.
I was the result of an affair when my biological father returned from Korea.
She raised me as a single mother pretending to be a widow. She was also quite abusive to me.
So much for those good ole’ days.
Rich Woods #29 wrote:
Oh, but I meant “British” to include the entire 19th century British Empire.
No. I didn’t. Sorry, my bad — I have a tin ear.
Perhaps this heralds an upcoming union between FoF and AiG. A traditional marriage made in hell.
I’m surprised. This has got to be one of the few times where the comments are legitimately better on Youtube than the video the comments are for.
And they also left like/dislike voting enabled. Foolish, foolish busybodies.
Fundie death cultists have a high divorce rate. Atheists have one of the lowest divorce rates.
If Focus on Hating Everybody was serious about nuclear families, they would be encouraging people to leave the xian death cults.
When you compare the Bible with Greek history (eg. Herodotus) you quickly realize that the “traditional” (as in monogamous) family came from the Greeks not the Bible.
@Rich Woods #29
To my Australian ear, he sounds like a Kiwi. His vowel sounds are much softer than the typical Australian accent. It’s not 100% New Zealander though, I would guess he’s spent many years abroad.
And ick. So much truth in replacing family with patriarchy.
focus on the family already released some movies (in the 80s or 90s, can’t remember). They were horrible childrens movies. I found one w/a fake gorilla and excessive ATV chase sequences.
Rottentomatoes identifies the host as “Tim Sisarich (Executive Director of Focus on the Family New Zealand)”.
By “not 100% New Zealander”, I meant not the cliched accent used by Australians for trans-Tasman stereotyping.
heres a non-story vid from them, courtesy of Everything Is Terrible.
http://www.everythingisterrible.com/2013/01/having-sex-makes-you-pregnant-with-aids.html
raven wrote:
I’m not surprised. It turns out that marrying just because you’re horny and want to have sex is actually a bad idea. And miraculously, marriages entered into because the involved parties want to be in a long term relationship with each other are somehow more stable. Who could’ve predicted this?
I have this strange feeling that LGBT marriages will prove quite a bit more resilient than fundy death cult marriages, too, and probably for much the same reason.
Interesting that they went “around the world” yet I think every single family that they show is white…
@16:
Eh…I don’t know. Sly and the Patriarchy Stone just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
@Sastra #37:
Ah, I see: an artifical cut-off point after the 18th century… ;-)
@Suido #41:
I agree, he’s certainly someone who’s travelled a lot. But then my rule of thumb for identifying a NZ accent is hearing 80%+ of all vowels as a short ‘i’!
This is all I could think about: It’s All Because (The Gays Are Getting Married)
Oldie but goodie.
Never forget that when the French collaborationist government took power in Vichy during WWII they replaced the revolutionary motto “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” with “Travail, Famille, Patrie” (Work, FAMILY, Fatherland)!
Every. Single. Time. I have gone to see The Hobbit, there has been an advertisement for this thing and so the beginning of my movie-watching time is spent being bloody pissed off to the point that I want to bite something. -_-
Well, the youtube comments are heartening–something I may never say or think again.
Speaking as the dad in an interracial family, we got a predictable two minutes hate when that Cheerios commercial came out. Luckily for us, there isn’t an anti-miscegenation group comparable in money and influence to Focus on the Family. I think it’s long past time that my gay friends (and other gays) no longer have to put up with this shit–the relevant demographics are shifting of course, but Focus on the Family should be filing bankruptcy now, not ten or twenty years from now.
Vows are overrated too. Vows and oaths and that shit. They’re absolutes, and we all know who deals in those.
Get him to say “Where’s the car?” and we should be able to figure it out.
He maybe did!
Okay, three more Flight of the Conchords links until I trip the spam filter… She’s so hot she’s making me sexist
Focus on the Family is not very Christian!
Mathew 10:21 And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death, and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents, and cause them to be put to death.
I wish those darned Christians would read their bible.
Vows are overrated too. Vows and oaths and that shit. They’re absolutes, and we all know who deals in those.
Siths?
@14:
You can add groups with “Freedom”, “Liberty”, or “Constitution” to the list, as well.
About the YouTube comments: They’ll just take that as proof as an Atheist/Commie/Facsist/Gay/Obama conspiracy against the oppressed Christian minority.
@Trebuchet,
You forgot Muslim, Nazi, and socialist in your list. You have to have the complete set.
aaronbaker wrote:
I had no idea what commerical you were talking about, so I found this article with the (positively adorable) commercial embedded. Sadly, don’t bother with the comments here. Along with the inevitable racists complaining about General Mills, there is a tone troll that is very indignant that someone would call racist idiots “knuckle-draggers”.
From the trailer, they are searching the world fot answers and finding only white people.
ck @60:
The ad is adorable, and so is this parody:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/13/cheerios-parody-hilarious-biracial-ad_n_3436239.html
aaronbaker wrote:
haha. That one’s awesome, and undoubtedly would cause some heads to explode.
Betcha that’s a lie. They’re going to “search the world” looking for things they can trot in front of the cameras as examples of the “truths” they already think they possess and want to brainwash the rest of the population into accepting.
The Antipodes are producing a lot of vile shit this year.
1. This from NZ Focus on the Family.
2. The vile senator Cory Bernardi has a book out called the Conservative Revolution (icky) http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-06/bill-shorten-offended-by-bernardi-comments-on-families/5186562
3. And Russel Crowe becomes Noah with survivors guilt. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1959490/
Sigh!!
I’ve been beaten to the punch on Cory Bernardi. I hope Prof. Myers reads his book, it will get him angry enough to take on a million Theists.
Can we start a new non-profit called, “Focusing on the Family, U.S.” We can play it like the Humaine Society of the United States that is not related to the Humaine Soceity that everyone knows and loves. I am sure that would piss of the Patriarchy clan!
wait…. after?
seems like bigots have been making people’s lives miserable for thousands of years.
on the bright side, I live here and can tell you that these people are mostly laughed at, and never taken seriously wrt to the final vote on any legislation.
hence, why the vote for equal marriage rights in NZ last year went 60/40 in favor through all stages.
you want scary from OZ??
look no further than everything and anything Tony Abbott has said and done for the last 10 years.
“Denise… turn off the youtube comments!”
There’s a perfectly innocent American social services agency called Family Focus (we have a branch here in Evanston Illinois). I’ve often thought they must receive a lot of misdirected hate mail.
USA – from Puritans to Impure-itans
Any connection between beautiful New England and predicted disasters?
Take same-sex marriage. I would have guessed that a “sin” city (San Francisco? Las Vegas?) would have been the first to legalize it.
Oddly it’s been America’s birthplace that’s wanted to be the first place to end America and its values! It’s been a Nor’easter of Perversion (helping to fulfill Luke 17’s “days of Lot”) that began in (you guessed it) Boston in 2004!
New England has gone from the Mayflower Compact to the Gay Power Impact, from Providence to decadence, from Bible thumpers to God dumpers, from university to diversity to perversity, and from the land of the Great Awakening to God’s Future Shakening that’ll make the Boston bombings look like Walden Pond ripples by comparison!
The same Nor’easter has been spreading south and as far west as Washington State where, after swelling up with pride, Mt. Rainier may wish to celebrate shame-sex marriage by having a blast that Seaddlepated folks can share in lava-land!
The same Luke 17 prediction is tied to the Book of Revelation which speaks of the cities that God will flatten because of same-sexism – including American cities – a scenario I’ll have to accept since I can’t create my own universe and decree rules for it.
I’ve just been analyzing the world’s terminal “religion” that has its “god,” its accessories, its “rites,” and even a flag. It’s an obsession that the infected converts are willing to live for, fight for – and even die for!
Some claim that Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. Well, when gays have birthdays they don’t say what they don’t want but say positively what they do want.
Likewise Jesus didn’t get negative and mention every sexual variation that He knew mankind would invent, but stated positively that marriage involves only a man and a woman!
Want more facts? Google “God to Same-Sexers: Hurry Up,” “Government-Approved Illegals,” “FOR GAYS ONLY: Jesus predicted,” “Filthy Still Club (Rev. 22:11),” and “The Background Obama Can’t Cover Up.”