gmonkey42

I DVR Glee and I hadn't seen the latest episode yet when I read manda Marcotte's post about it. So I watched it today.

Kurt is my favorite character, he's awesome. In this episode, Kurt's father had a heart attack and was in the hospital in a coma. The other members of the glee club want to sing "spiritual" (a.k.a. Christian) songs at school and pray for Kurt's dad but Kurt doesn't want this because he's an atheist. He asks these people, who are supposed to be his friends, to respect his beliefs. They don't. He catches them at the hospital praying over his comatose dad. They even make the ludicrous claim that they all belong to different denominations and religions (some Christians and one Jew) so one of them must be right. He shows admirable restraint and asks them to leave.

I got pissed off and fast-forwarded through a lot of it.

Then later Mercedes, Kurt's best friend and one of the people who were praying over Kurt's dad, confronts Kurt at his locker, accuses him of missing out on experiences and of shutting out his friends. Kurt agrees and apologizes. Then he agrees to go to church with her. I turned it off at that point.

The other major problem with the episode was the only atheist character besides Kurt was the show's villain, Sue Sylvester (and the only other character I like besides Kurt). Both Kurt and Sue had stories about how they became atheists because they're mad at God.

The clear message of this episode was that Kurt's friends did a good, noble thing for Kurt by trampling all over his feelings and doing what he had specifically asked them not to do.

Several characters gently admonish Kurt that he should be nice because people are only trying to help him. When in fact they're helping themselves feel better at the expense of making Kurt feel worse. These characters are selfish assholes and they're being portrayed as generous friends, while Kurt is portrayed as being unreasonable and mean to them by rejecting the "help" he made it clear he doesn't want.


That is why I am done with Glee.

I ordered Roundtable Pizza for dinner and when I went to pick it up, I saw something crazy. You know how in restaurants they sometimes have coloring sheets for the kids? They had one of the Roundtable knight reading a book. A kid, "Bobby, age 12," had colored it in and written on the blank book cover "BIBLE" and there was a cross. OK, I'm an atheist but that's pretty harmless, right?

On the knight's chest, he'd drawn a bigger cross and written "INQUISITION." Yeah. There are a few possibilities here:

1. The kid's fundie parents had fed him a Disneyfied version of the Inquisition and he didn't really know what it meant.

2. He did know that it was pretty much the same as making Pizza Knight a Nazi, and was batshit crazy enough to do it anyway.

3. "Bobby" is not in fact a 12-year-old but rather an adult with an awesomely twisted sense of humor.


In any case, I, for one, did not expect it.


[rim shot]