How do you win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate if you’re from Alabama? Considering that Roy Moore came ever-so-close to doing it, we can safely say being a child molester doesn’t hurt.

But being a fan of Game of Thrones? That might do it.

AL Secretary of State John Merrill, who’s in that race, said over the weekend that TV is no good anymore because everything is gay gay gay.

Yellowhammer News reports that Merrill was asked to comment on the “shift in the culture”:

“[T]hat’s what we’ve allowed to happen,” Merrill said. “How have we allowed it to happen? There are no more good TV shows on like ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Virginian,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘I Love Lucy.’ We don’t have those shows anymore. We’re too interested in homosexual activities. We’re too interested in seeing how this family’s finding a way to mess on this family or to see how people are trying to date on TV, or having wife-swapping on TV. That’s what we watch. When we push back against that, and we quit allowing it to be in our homes — that’s how those changes have occurred because we’ve allowed them to slowly but surely come into our lives.”

Trashy TV has always been around, which is to say there are plenty of reasons to talk about what’s wrong with the medium. But it’s downright ignorant to pretend we’re worse off than we were several decades ago. What we have now are more creative outlets, with a more diverse array of characters, and an ability for creators to tell stories that were rarely, if ever, told in the past. That’s a huge plus, even if a bunch of shows aren’t to your liking.

Of course Merrill can’t deal with gay characters in TV, because that would require admitting gay people deserve some empathy as fellow humans. (Not every show with gay characters is all about sex, and plenty of “straight” shows are full of it.)
It’s also telling which shows Merrill holds up as the classics: the ones that featured a very uncomplicated sort of America that never truly existed. Not shows that challenged viewers or ever made them reach beyond their comfort zones. (Even I Love Lucy had the main couple sleeping in separate beds. Like normal married couples do.)

It’s exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from people who only ever claim to love one book.

When asked later what he meant by “homosexual activities,” Merrill didn’t get specific.

Asked to explain what he meant, Merrill said, “I meant what I said. People are too interested in anything that is not uplifting, edifying. They’re too busy being preoccupied with homosexual activities and the wife swap shows.”

He declined to give examples of how Americans are too preoccupied with “homosexual activities.”

He can’t give examples. He just knows homosexuality is evil. Isn’t that enough for you people?!

As we’ve said before, no one is more preoccupied with what gay men do in the bedroom than straight white conservative Christians. It’s all they ever think about.