Hollywood's attack on society.

The movie Brokeback Mountain, represents the next stage in the campaign to homosexualize society--a movement that accelerated with the 1999 film American Beauty. As that film was about to sweep the Oscars, The Wanderer, an American Catholic weekly, reported at the time that the homosexual magazine, The Advocate, gloated that the movie represented the capture of Hollywood by homosexual activists. They, The Advocate wrote, would use the entertainment industry "to homosexualize the culture and shape the minds of millions of American middle-class youth to accept homosexuality and transgenderism as a progressive development of the human condition.

"But if anyone thinks that films such as American Beauty and Boys Don't Cry, which portray homosexuals as more normal, happy, and well adjusted than suburban, middle-class families, mark the end of the journey toward acceptability, one has only to look at the writing of homosexual philosopher and pundit Bariel Rotello. He points the way for future filmmaking: the mainstreaming of hard-core homosexual, lesbian, and transgendered pornography by removing the stigma attached to it.

"Pornography, Rotello writes, is so important to gay identity, so powerful in shaping the sexual mores and activities of the next generation, so necessary for expanding the range of sexual practices, that the talented, politically conscious filmmakers in Hollywood should make pornography as acceptable as they have homosexuality...

"The homosexual partners in American Beauty, the two Jims, writes Cosmopolitan writer, Jeffrey Epstein, 'will pave the way for more gay folk in studio films. To me, the future of gay subject matter is mainstream film is in movies that have gay content but no one's really talking about it.'"

Hollywood has been promoting homosexuality for quite some time, Time magazine of January 30, 2006 reports. There was The Crying Game in 1992 ($63 million US), Philadelphia in 1993 ($77 million U.S.), and The Birdcage in 1996 (124 million U.S.). Time magazine itself happily contributes to the promotion, as do all large liberal dailies such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and in Canada, the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star. Time itself has featured propaganda such as its October 10, 2005 cover story, "The Battle Over Gay Teens;" attacks against the Boy Scouts; and portraits of "transgender" activists as oppressed. These stories are from an author who has elsewhere self-identified as a "gay" man, according to WorldNetDaily.com (Oct. 18, 2005).

U.S. bishops' rating of Brokeback

In response to infuriated Catholics, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' Office for Film and Broadcasting did a sudden turnaround in its rating for the movie. Originally rated "L (limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling), the USCCB has reclassified the movie to O--morally offensive. This has been done, it said, because the serious weight of the L rating--which restricts films in that category to those who can assess, from a Catholic perspective, the moral issues raised by a movie--is, unfortunately, misunderstood by many."

Notwithstanding the change of rating, a sympathetic review of the movie remains on the USCCB website. It reads in part, "As the Catholic Church makes a distinction between homosexual orientation and activity, Ennis and Jack's (the movie's protagonists) continuing physical relationship is morally problematic...

"Except for the initial sex scene, and brief bedroom encounters between the men and their (bare-breasted wives), there's no sexually related nudity.... While the actions taken by Ennis and Jack cannot be endorsed, the universal themes of love and loss ring true."

Many Catholics have been intrigued enough by the review to see the movie.

A Time magazine article by Richard Corliss noted the film's impact on American culture, not to mention the money it stands to rake in:

"In certain events that leave their mark on pop culture, there comes a flash point when everyone's talking about the same thing....

"The film is the front runner for the Oscars. No film is even second.

"The next step is to turn buzz into bucks, cachet into cash, and Brokeback has been doing just that." Now in 1190 theatres, "The film has managed to carry the luster of its daring, as one of the rare Hollywood movies that are frank about gay sexuality, without provoking the sustained ire of conservatives. Says Jack Foley, Focus' chief of distribution, "America didn't resist the film for a second.'"

Using a "modified limited rollout" marketing strategy, Focus released the film first to urban cinemas, not necessarily in gay neighbourhoods, and relied on word of mouth. It also spent more on marketing the movie than it cost to make it, making women their primary target. Its marketers figured men would go along if they "do not want to look like a complete troglodyte to their girlfriends" (Time, Jan. 30, 2006).

Among Catholic in Canada, the Prairie Messenger, Saskatchewan's Catholic weekly, also praised the movie. Reviewer Gerald Schmitz wrote: "In this affair of the heart there's no begging your pardon, and no ranch rose garden at the end of the rainbow either.... Such sensitive material demands special handling. Among the many virtues of Lee's directorial mastery is the way it melds a brilliant cast and cinematography with a subtle grasp of constricting circumstance to bring a profound empathetic touch to every episode, scene and smallest nuance. "'Raw, limpid, poetic, and above all, true,' is how one commentator on the Internet movie database puts it, calling Brokeback Mountain a 'cinematic landmark.' I completely agree."

The reality

Ted Baehr, a Christian movie reviewer, points out these facts about the film: "It uses about 58 obscenities (including many 'f' words), 15 strong profanities, one light profanity; references to urinating; two extreme scenes of bloody violence include shots of a castrated man and a man's head is beaten bloody until he is dead; scenes of violence where men fight and wrestle in a rough way; the homosexual sodomy scene plays almost like a homosexual rape; very strong sexual content includes depicted homosexual and heterosexual sodomy (with a hint of sadomasochism during one or more homosexual scenes); homosexual kissing and groping; intercourse between married couples; implied intercourse and almost intercourse with women who are shown topless; upper female nudity in several scenes; full male nudity in bathing scene; rear male nudity; alcohol use and drunkenness; smoking; lying; men cheating on their wives; sexual 'repression' seen as evil; family arguments; divorce; and a negative portrayal of fathers."

Author of the best-selling book, The Marketing of Evil, David Kupelian offers his review of the movie on the website, WorldNetDaily.com. He wrote: "Lost [in all this sentimentality], however, are towering, life-and-death realities concerning sex and morality and the sanctitiy of marriage and the preciousness of children and the direction of our civilization itself. So please, you moviemakers, how about easing off that tight camera shot of Ennis's suffering and doing a slow pan over the massive wreckage all around him? What about the years of silent anguish and loneliness Alma [his wife] stoically endures for the sake of keeping her family together, or the terrible betrayal, suffering and tears of the children bereft of a father? None of this merits more than a brief acknowledgment in Brokeback Mountain."

"The result," he continues, "is a brazen propaganda vehicle designed to replace the reservations most Americans still have toward homosexuality with powerful feelings of sympathy, guilt over past 'homophobia'--and ultimately the complete and utter acceptance of homosexuality as equivalent in every way to heterosexuality."

Kupelian goes on to point out that the movie is brilliantly executed. Through music, the script, camera angles and the actors themselves the movie effectively evokes the viewer's sympathy for the characters' conflict and loneliness. But all of this talent and brilliance are placed at the service of the "twisted and the perverse." What's to stop Hollywood, he asks, from achieving the same feat of propaganda once again, but in a different cause, such as "glorifying incest, or even an adult-child sexual relationship?" "Like Brokeback, it too would serve to desensitize us to the immoral and destructive reality of what we're seeing, while fervently coaxing us into embracing that which we once shunned" (WorldNetDaily.com, Dec. 27, 2005).