China to Hollywood: Don’t Say Gay
When the Chinese found out about the unnecessary addition of an LGBT relationship, they asked producers to cut it. Hollywood obliged.
The Left doesn’t mind when China controls the conversation, but they sure care when American parents do. That’s the incredible hypocrisy of the Florida law hysteria. Woke CEOs are pitching a fit that states want to silence talk of sex and gender for kindergarteners, but if China wants to censor it? One entertainment group says: no problem.
It’s the irony of ironies. Warner Brothers studios, in a sequel to its Fantastic Beasts spin-off, decided to add some gay undertones to Albus Dumbledore’s character. When China found out about the unnecessary addition of an LGBT relationship, they asked producers to cut it. Hollywood, ever the compliant partner of the communist regime, obliged. “We want audiences everywhere in the world to see and enjoy this film,” a Warner spokesperson said, “and it’s important to us that Chinese audiences have the opportunity to experience it as well, even with these minor edits.”
In other words, it’s okay for a global abuser of human rights to demand an end to LGBT indoctrination, but not American parents? If China says sexualization is off limits, it’s “responding sensitively to a variety of in-market factors.” If parents do, it’s a “hateful form of bullying” that hurts children. No wonder the grassroots are upset.
“This double standard — Republican governors can’t make reasonable and popular policy changes in this country, but the Chinese government’s whims must be respected, even if they violate progressive pieties — is untenable,” Jack Butler argues. And yet, the Left is only digging in, accusing Republicans of reigniting the culture wars for political gain. “They just kept pivoting until they could find the thing that they thought would capture the public’s imagination and turn them against LGBTQ equality…” the Human Rights Campaign complained to the New York Times. “They’ve cared about women’s sports for exactly as long as it was politically expedient.”
Wait a minute, most parents would say. Republicans didn’t pick this fight. They didn’t send their government attack dogs after Title IX or demand taxpayer funding for children’s sex changes. They didn’t fire off executive orders opening our daughters’ locker rooms and teams to the opposite sex. Or infiltrate classrooms with science-denying lessons on sex and gender and offer LGBT erotica in school libraries. Democrats did that. If this is a “political opening for Republicans” as the Times argues, then it’s because the majority of America agrees with them.
“At the end of the day,” the Daily Wire’s Mary Margaret Olohan said on “Washington Watch,” “this is about children.” “And there are many political issues that Americans will disagree over on both sides of the aisle, be it the border wall or abortion. But when it comes to your children, parents are a lot more unified, I think, in [wanting] to be able to control what your children are being taught.”
And the ferocious pushback to Disney, the public schools, Hollywood, and any woke corporation telling parents to butt out of child-rearing is a prime example of that. The Left is spinning its wheels, desperate to find traction for an agenda that’s wildly unpopular across almost every demographic. Right now, 68 percent of Americans don’t even want to do business with Disney for trying to sexualize Florida’s K-3 classes — and that includes almost 50 percent of Democrats!
Obviously, Olohan shook her head, “This is not a message that [is resonating] with Americans.” And yet, Democrats — taken hostage by their woke fringe — refuse to back away, sounding more desperate and tone deaf by the minute. “If you look at what happened in Virginia,” she went on, “we were in sort of the same situation during the gubernatorial election — where a lot of people thought that Terry McAuliffe would kind of skate into the governor’s seat as a Democrat. And then amidst all of this talk about education, he had to go and say that parents didn’t have the right to decide what their children should be taught. Well, that pretty much won the election for Governor Youngkin. And so we’re seeing this translated across the country as parents kind of speak up, finally. [It’s] a parental rebellion against woke ideology.”
Disney — and Democrats in general — need to see the handwriting on the wall and back down, or else these midterm elections will be the beginning of the wilderness years for the president’s party. As more parents are starting to realize, whether it’s education or entertainment, there’s no middle ground on extremism.
Originally published here.
Escape from Xinjiang: The First Christian Family Speaks out
When Ovalbek Turdakun opens his eyes on Easter morning, nothing will feel familiar. Six thousand miles away from the life they knew, he and his family will be celebrating the Resurrection in safety — a luxury that few survivors of the Xinjiang camps will ever know. Touching down on American soil late Friday night, Ovalbek, his wife, and 12-year-old son exhaled for the first time in four years — the horrors of China finally behind them. This Sunday, they’ll sit in church pews without fear, openly worshipping the God who delivered them to freedom.
“We didn’t think the government would come to welcome us ordinary people,” Ovalbek told reporters through a translator when he landed at Dulles airport and was greeted by U.S. officials carrying chocolate chip cookies and Washington Nationals gear. “I’m grateful to our God,” he said. “I’m also grateful to the U.S. government and the friends who helped us the whole time. We would not have been able to safely arrive in America without their help.”
Believed to be the only Christian family to escape to the U.S. intact, the Turdakuns have waited years for this moment — an end to the nightmare so many Uyghurs and ethnic minorities are still living. Like so many others, their story began at home with a knock on the door. For weeks, the Chinese authorities would call their house or come by to threaten him. After a month of this nightly trauma, they finally took Ovalbek into custody, sending him to a camp where he would spend the next 10 months suffering.
“Everything was painful,” he remembered. Each morning, he and his 23 cellmates would wake up in a tiny, crowded, windowless room with harsh lights that never went off. Guards would order them to sing communist songs to get their breakfasts. Talking to other prisoners was forbidden. If anyone was caught whispering, the entire cell was punished. The worst part, he told National Review, were the injections — a toxic mix that left him with fevers and searing pain in his ears, hands, and feet. Other times, the shots would make him sick with diarrhea and vomiting, unable to walk as an eerie yellow substance leaked from his ears (likely his own spinal fluid, experts now say). “I was in despair,” he said, worried that he would be permanently paralyzed. “How would I live after getting out? How would I work?”
But escape was a far-off dream, he started to believe. On the worst days, Ovalbek was beaten with batons or strapped to tiger chairs, a favorite form of Chinese torture. Locked into the metal seat with steel restraints on his waist, arms, and legs, he was shocked if he moved or fell asleep. Dehydrated, starving, and blinded by light, survivors say the experience is excruciating. Some people sit shackled for days, swollen and bleeding. Ovalbek sat for three.
Without explanation in December of that year, he was told he was being released — free to travel to Kyrgyzstan with his wife and son. Terrified that he would be deported back to China, the family says they lived in constant fear for two years. In May of last year, when Ovalbek realized with alarm that he’d been locked out of his Chinese bank accounts, he frantically reached out to Ethan Gutmann, a Uyghur expert and advocate based in D.C. Together with a Canadian surveillance analyst, FRC’s own Bob Fu, and a few other American activists, they “hatched a plan to get the family out.”
For Fu, who’s tried to rescue other Xinjiang detainees through his group ChinaAid, the risks of the Turdakuns traveling alone were too great. Ultimately, “the group settled on a plan to have the family pose as tourists and fly to Turkey, where they could wait for the State Department to make its decision, according to Gutmann.” The theory was “if we could get some Americans and Canadians to go with the family, exit customs would be far less likely to stop them.”
The ruse worked. On January 9th, the State Department granted the family special permission to enter the U.S. By April 1st, Homeland Security had signed off on their arrival. Now, four years after their harrowing ordeal, the family is here, together and safe. “My greatest hope,” Ovalbek says, “is to quickly become an American citizen.”
On the somber moments when he stops to think about the past, he gets chills. “The level of torture and abuses against Mr. Turdakun for being a Kyrgyz Christian in China’s concentration camps is beyond human imagination,” Fu insists. “This is just the tip of the iceberg of the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and religious persecution. "The U.S. and international community can and should do more to compel the Chinese communist regime to stop this evil before it’s too late.”
In the meantime, Ovalbek will prepare to testify before Congress — helping America piece together a story the world is only starting to comprehend. “His testimony is key,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) explained, “because there are very few survivors of these camps who make it to the safety of the United States to tell their story.” Until then, the Turdakuns will settle into a hopeful chapter in America, especially grateful for the new life Resurrection Sunday represents.
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
