Kids React to Gay Marriage Proposal Video. Is this Child Abuse?

Damien LeGallienne reporting for TheDamienZone.com.

Let me start off by saying that there is a Facebook share going around that has me puzzled, amused and a little angry.

As many of you already know, I loath the FSWS ( Facebook Simpletons Who Share) community.

Only one Hollywood comedy writer would speak to the Damien Zone about this.    He was very pleasant and thoughtful about it.  You can see his brief bio here  —-> David D, Matta.   He restored our faith in Hollywood to some extent.

Remember that the FSWS community is limited to people who share maudlin, mawkish, stupid, sentimental, fake and outright offensive stuff on their Facebook pages.

If you share my blog entries, you are a genius, but if you share fake quotes from the Dalai Lama, John Lennon,  Betty White, Mother Teresa, or you put up photos of sick babies, and for every “like” the baby will get a heart transplant, you are a Facebook Simpleton Who Shares.

Facebook Simpletons are truly sick people, and there is nothing than can be done for them other than to take away their internet access or warn innocent bystanders that they are nearby — and they‘re readily spreading their simpleton-ism. They’re electronic Typhoid Marys.

With that said, Kindly note that there is a new viral video on the simpleton choo-choo train. The trouble with this one is that it’s a tad too sophisticated for the simpletons. Of course the simpletons don’t realize anything about that, and being simpletons, they are happy to share it mindlessly.

It’s a video wherein school kids ages 5 through 13  – sitting in what looks like a school room  —  are shown videos of gay marriage proposals.

Both proposals were rather innovative in that one involved two gay men in love and a flash mob in Home Depot. The other was a woman standing on top of a vehicle facing her partner’s office window. She holds up large placards on which are written some lovey-dovey stuff and ultimately a proposal of marriage. The kids react to the videos and then are asked a bunch of questions by an off-camera interviewer — who is no Art Linkletter, I can assure you.

First off — I stand in favor of gay marriage. It is my belief that there shouldn’t even be a term for “gay marriage.”  Marriage is marriage, and unless a marriage is being used to dodge immigration laws or is being forced upon two unwilling people for the purpose of cultural ritual, all persons should be openly allowed to marry whomever they wish to marry. If both parties are willing and both parties are human beings and both are reasonably sound of mind, there is no reason to deny either of them the right to marry — period.

Secondly — I do not like crafty editing and sleight of hand. The very nature of The Damien Zone is to trick or fool or mock, but many of my more astute readers eventually learn to read between the lines. They are able to discern deeper meaning if and when it exists, and they are also aware of the fact that sometimes I speak from the heart. I am not always yanking your chain. Sometimes I am a really nice guy and sometimes I am a nasty a-hole.

So, the kids watch the video and except for one really little kid, they are all pretty much in agreement that gay marriage is great and that boys should be able to marry boys and girls should be able to marry girls.  Of course some of these kids are too young to know what all this means, but the people who made this dopey film don’t seem to have a problem with that.

There is a little confusion in the minds of the younger kids in the video, but these are CHILDREN being asked for their analysis of something that involves an underlying issue of sexuality and sex.   Yeah, folks, marriage and sex are kind of intertwined — even if both parties are spayed or neutered.

It’s only natural for a small child to get confused with the concept of gay marriage — and here’s why.

Little kids know that boys kiss girls and girls kiss boys and that babies come out of their mommy’s tummy. For the most part, children are not yet consciously aware that there are sexual aspects to why people, gay or straight, get married.  To ask or probe these kids for answers or opinions about gay issues is bordering on being criminal, and I think that the folks who made this should be forced to answer some hard questions.

Would you ask a child, “Do you know what mommies and daddies do after they get married and go on their honeymoon?”  If the kid says, “They kiss.” do you follow that up with, “But what else do they do?”  No — only a sick mind would ask a child those questions.  The interviewer does not ask these questions openly, but anybody with a brain knows that this is the undercurrent inherent to questions about why a person is gay or straight.

Little kids notwithstanding, even the older kids — the 12 and 13 year olds — are minors.  It doesn’t matter how snappy or sophisticated their answers might be. This is not an appropriate topic for children.

If you approached a child in a school yard and showed them a video of a man kissing a man and asked the kids questions about their opinions on “gay stuff” you would get hauled off to the jailhouse. For some strange reason, however, these filmmakers are immune from whatever law is in place to protect kids from this kind of exploitation. The interviewer was asking little kids some very provocative questions about issues of sexuality that were not so openly apparent to the viewer or the child.  The answers these CHILDREN gave might seem cute and cuddly to some — especially the  “you’ll-cry-when-you-see-this” simpletons — but what are the repercussions down the road?

How many hundreds of minutes were edited out of this? What happened to some of the kid’s comments that didn’t make it to the final cut of this video?  What did some of the kids say or do that we are not shown in the final edition of this as it appears on YouTube?  And, what do the parents of these children think about all this?  The answer to the parent question is easy because it connects directly back to the trickery of this video.

Don’t let the cork and thumb tack bulletin board in the background fool you.  This is not a school, or if it is a school, the school is only being used as a “location” for a film project.  These are kids who in all probablity showed up for a casting call of sorts, and some of them are already seasoned little performers with pushy parents standing off to the side.  You can see the older girls acting and mugging looking for the camera and the oldest boy looks like he is waiting for Wink Martindale to die.

It’s so easy to tell that what we got here for the most part were typical infomercial-ish testimonials from kids who already know how to chew up the scenery.

The little actor/entertainer in the kid’s mind says,   “I will say something like really slick and like totally cool and awesome and positive about gay marriage and then my segment will appear in the final totally awesome product.”  Then the guy who made the film does some really slick editing ( kudos for that) and out comes this video.  It would be a really great video if the kids were 16-18 but they’re not.  They are children.

Again, let me emphasize, if anyone were to approach these kids in the playground and ask these questions or showed kids these videos, they would be brought up on charges.  But….since this video pushes a gay agenda, no one has said a thing.  There is a huge difference between being a noble champion for gay rights and being a couple of creepy guys who want to indoctrinate kids the same way religious groups indoctrinate them.   Do you see the insanity?  Do you see why people get angry?

To be fair, the interviewer tried to be fair, but it’s a moot point.  These were children being asked about an adult issue.  Plain and simple — one does not ask kids to watch this stuff and then ask them questions that one would get in big trouble for asking them in any other situation.  It’s all so very sketchy.  It’s low rent.

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