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Art & Culture: Personalizing Politics

Plugged In has often said that the entertainment we engage and indulge in has the power to mold how we see and think about the world—whether we realize it or not.

And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision making gay marriage legal in the United States, openly homosexual actor Harvey Fierstein is—perhaps surprisingly—making the same argument. He notes that the breathtaking speed at which our culture has pivoted on this issue isn’t primarily due to politicians’ decisions, but to entertainment’s powerful ability to personalize otherwise abstract issues.

In an article for The Hollywood Reporter, Fierstein says:

Many gay battles were won in the arts. Television conquered more beach heads than Marines took in any war. Think about everyday folks watching Will and Grace on television. They loved those characters. They had those characters over to their houses once a week. They ate with them on TV. They watched them in their underwear. They became their friends. So while it was easy for them to say, ‘I don’t want homosexuals to have special rights,’ not one of them was going to say, ‘I want my friends Will and Jack to lose their jobs because they’re gay.’ Arts make the political personal.

Fierstein concludes his brief commentary by saying, “This speedy war whose victory we celebrate today was fought in theaters, art galleries, in TV sitcoms, Hollywood movies and on and on.”

I certainly don’t side with Fierstein’s political stance when it comes to the cultural watershed moment we’ve just crossed with regard to gay marriage in America. But I do agree with his assessment of the influential role that popular entertainment has likely played in undermining a biblical understanding of marriage and homosexuality. Will and Grace, Modern Family’s Cam and Mitch and a host of other fictional same-sex couples helped pave the way for the institutionalizing of same-sex marriage nationwide.