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TechnoratiOpponents of the California same-sex marriage ban have released a Web video satire entitled "Prop 8: The Musical" that mocks Christians as hatemongers and Jesus as a Bible critic.
The three-minute video was posted last Wednesday on FunnyOrDie.com, a website founded by comedian Will Ferrell, and is gaining viral video status with over 2.4 million views.
A star-studded cast, which includes Jack Black, Neil Patrick Harris, John C. Reilly, Andy Richter, Maya Rudolph, Margaret Cho, Rashida Jones and others, is featured in the low-budget musical parody conceived by the composer of "Hairspray," Marc Shaiman, who is openly gay.
The video opens with a colorfully dressed bunch, which includes a hippie Rudolph and a tattooed Cho, singing and celebrating a "new Obama day" and "happy days for the gays" against a beach backdrop.
Then enters a black-clad Reilly and another actress with a scheme to "spread some hate and put it in the Constitution." They crash the beach party and unscroll a bill reading: "Prop. 8."
A group dressed in black Sunday clothes, apparently portraying Christians, joins Reilly in chorus to plead with the audience to listen to their warning that the other group will "teach kids about sodomy."
The colorful group calls the warning a "lie," to which the Prop. 8-supporting Christians respond: "But it works." The two groups continue to argue, with the first group claiming their "love is not a sin," while the Christian group remarks that "the Bible says it so."
Jesus, played by Black, intervenes in the debate by saying, "The Bible says a lot of things, you know?" The Christian group asks whether the Bible considers gays "an abomination."
But Jesus dismisses the Bible reference, saying that "Leviticus also says shellfish is an abomination" and that the "Bible says a lot of interesting things like you can stone your wife or sell your daughter into slavery."
When the Christians say they "ignore those verses," Jesus scolds them for picking and choosing. Jesus reminds them that the nation was built on the separation of church and state before his good-bye parting, "See ya later sinners!"
Harris has better luck convincing the Christians to oppose Proposition 8 by telling them that "gay marriages will save the economy." According to Harris, "there's money to be made" from the gay weddings to lawyers for gay divorces. After he points at the "millions lost in all your disapproving," the Christians admit they have been "such fools."
While some internet bloggers have found the video to be "funny" and "hilarious," many Christians aren't laughing at the Hollywood parody.
"It is more of the anti-religious bigotry for which this industry, supposedly so devoted to 'tolerance,' has become famous," L. Brent Bozell III, founder of Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, said in a recent opinion piece.
Bozel took issue with Shaiman's portrayal of a "phony-baloney Jesus" who seems to be quoting from an Obama speech in 2006 that suggested Christian conservatives weren't reading their Leviticus, he said.
"But neither Obama nor Shaiman will admit in the Bible there is also St. Peter’s vision in the Acts of the Apostles, where he’s told to abandon the idea of clean and unclean foods," said Bozel. "Only someone utterly ignorant would make a video where Jesus descends in a vision to humanity only to sound like a lawyer for the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union)." Continue »
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