February 16, 2016 5:49 AM

Another Great Moment in Weapons-Grade Stupid

The new single “Girl Crush” from Grammy-winning country group Little Big Town has been pulled from many country radio stations for angering listeners who claim the song “promotes a gay agenda.”…. But “Girl Crush” isn’t about a lesbian relationship — in fact, it’s reportedly about a woman being jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend…. A co-host of a country music station in Idaho told the Washington Post that after playing the song she was flooded with angry calls from listeners saying they didn’t want the song played in front of their kids…. “You are just promoting the gay agenda on your station,” a Texas radio program director said she heard one caller say. “I am changing the channel and never listening to you ever again!”

While Erin and I have been staying on the Oregon Coast for a long Valentine’s weekend, we’ve been a lot to a country music station in Newport. Last night, for the first time, I heard Little Big Town’s “Girl Crush.” It’s a catchy enough song, but what struck me were the lyrics. Anyone actually listening honestly to the song would quickly understand the lyrics aren’t about lesbianism, or forbidden desires, or promoting The Homosexual Agenda ©. As lead singer Karen Fairchild put it, “It’s about a girl saying, you know, ‘Why do you love her and not me?’”

That’s it- no underlying pro-lesbian message or bias; it’s just a song about love and loss and pain.

This is what makes hate and homophobia so incredibly, distressingly stupid. Those who can’t be bothered to listen and think critically instead of reacting emotionally and immediately using a minimum of information filtered through fear and prejudice look like right morons. Instead of enjoying what’s actually a pretty decent song for what it is, so called “decent Christians” and those steeped in hatred and exclusion have leapt to the conclusion that “Girl Crush” is a “lesbian song.” Sure, the lyrics, if taken out of context and/or the true message completely ignored, could be construed as promoting lesbianism…but how thoroughly addled and frighteningly intolerant must a person be to leap to that sort of sick, twisted conclusion?

The controversy is based on a small section of the song’s lyrics:

I want to taste her lips
Yeah, ‘cause they taste like you
I want to drown myself
In a bottle of her perfume
I want her long blonde hair
I want her magic touch
Yeah, ‘cause maybe then
You’d want me just as much
I got a girl crush

I suppose this controversy appeals to those who run on self-righteous outrage and who, without having something to vent their considerable and constant anger over, would have little if anything to live for. Even if you’re morally opposed to anything redolent of homosexuality, wouldn’t it make sense to understand the lyrics you’re vociferously opposing? How is it even possible to intelligently speak to something you can’t be bothered to understand? Do you not realize how reactionary and ignorant reacting without understanding looks? Or do you simply not care about the truth…or that you look like a common, garden-variety bigot far more comfortable with reacting than thinking?

Sometimes, the stupid can feel almost overwhelming. How can one kindly and gently react to someone so steeped in ignorance and fear that they’d be outraged about a “lesbian song” whose lyrics have nothing at all to do with lesbianism? The song’s about a woman trying to understand how a man could prefer another woman over her. The lyrics take a unique approach to portraying the thought process of someone clearly in tremendous pain…but I suppose some people lack the intellectual agility necessary to recognize anything not spelled out in black and white terms.

In the end, hatred and homophobia only make those trafficking in it look weak and stupid. This sorry saga stands as proof of that theorem.

As that wise sage, John Wayne once said, “Life is hard. It’s harder when you’re stupid.”

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on February 16, 2016 5:49 AM.

If political signs possessed even the barest shred of integrity was the previous entry in this blog.

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