There was always a reckoning coming for Hollywood as it embraced the modern LGBTetc movement. You saw it beginning to emerge several months ago when actress Jennifer Aniston lamented how so many young people were "troubled" by the misogyny and homophobia they saw watching reruns of Aniston's hit television series Friends.
This has always been stupidity in supporting and worshipping the spirit of the age. The age changes quickly, and even those who in one moment are beloved and idolized can quickly find themselves on the outside looking in. Ask the once celebrated radical feminist author J.K. Rowling, who is now a defrocked heretic in the church of what's-happening-now.
I know everyone loves to pretend like Christianity is the faith of load-bearing laws and rigid rules. But the freedom that comes to a soul when it worships a constant - the same yesterday, today, and forever - is unmatched and unrivaled. God's expectations for human behavior and His guideposts for human flourishing will never shift or uproot. His love is eternal, His commands clear, and His promise of grace is unimaginable.
The world offers anything but those things.
That's why, when news spread regarding the untimely death of Aniston's co-star Matthew Perry ("Chandler" from Friends), I was curious what the reaction would be. Would the prophets of the modern age embrace his legacy or erase it? It seems they have chosen option 3: rewrite it.
From Slate:
"Matthew Perry's Chandler Did More for Queerness Than We Give Him Credit For"
Chandler Bing was the epitome of gay panic, but he also, eventually modeled gay acceptance.
…
It's easy to pile on Friends for what it didn't do — cast nearly any people of color, for instance — but by the same token, we also have to give the series credit for what it did do. Its queer characters were usually played as smart and interesting, not as just one-dimensional villains. The gay jokes were nothing compared to the violent homophobia of other media at the time. In fact, the subtext of most of the show's homophobia, such as Chandler's disgust at the male body and eternal worry about being seen as gay, was always about insecurity, not prejudice. Chandler may not have been fully queer coded, but he had a queer pathos, uncomfortable in his body, traumatized by his dad being gay and then trans (his worst Thanksgiving memory was his father sleeping with his Latino housekeeper). That plot conflated transgender, drag, and gay in a way that was ignorant but not malicious. When the show revealed Chandler's "father" as a woman, they were portrayed by Kathleen Turner, an A-list legend, not a mustachioed caricature of a woman or man in a wig… The friends in Friends seemed like people who would accept me as a gay person.
I know Satan blinds the eyes of unbelievers, but I can never seem to escape the feelings of awe I have that someone can write words like that and not see the deception they're under. First of all, "gay acceptance" is a curious phrase to use given that "gay acceptance" today means a level of celebration, embrace, and promotion that didn't exist in the era of Friends. Remember, Barack Obama campaigned for president in 2008 on the position that marriage was spiritually intended and legally reserved to relationships between men and women only. Think about that. Espousing the same view that got Barack Obama elected president would get you canceled, ostracized, tarred, and feathered today.
That's the unreliability and fickle foolishness of pop culture.
And maybe that's why Matthew Perry seemingly wanted less and less to do with it the older he got. To my knowledge, Perry never converted his heart and mind to Christ. But he seemed to recognize the eerie hollowness and emptiness associated with what the world offers us. Far from adulatory, fawning tributes to his work on a scripted sitcom, here's what Perry ironically wanted to be remembered for:
"Things I did to try to help other people": A noble thought that deserves our attention and respect provided we realize what it is to truly "help" others. It's not just making them laugh or entertaining them. And it's certainly not rewriting their legacy to fit them into modern man's culturally approved box.
