Ever since Seinfeld became available to stream on Netflix, I've been binge-watching it. One of my favorite episodes has to be "The Outing" (season 4, episode 17), where Elaine pranks an eavesdropping journalist (not knowing she's a journalist) by claiming George and Jerry are a couple. Word gets out about the fictional couple; they freak out; and every time they deny the rumor, they add the line, "Not that there's anything wrong with that."
Curious to see what others thought of this episode and the inevitable controversy surrounding, I decided to peruse IMDb reviews. While it appeared most reviewers understood the point of the episode, some anti-LGBT conservatives had quite the take. Their belief is that the episode was satirizing liberalism by contending how ridiculous it is to force acceptance of the LGBT community. Well, I'm sorry to have to tell them this (not really), but they're sorely mistaken, and may want to lay off the hallucinogens.
This episode was released 28 years ago, in 1993. Societal acceptance of the LGBT community at this time wasn't nearly at the rate that it is today. According to Gallup, gay-marriage approval in 1997 was 27% and increasing, so odds are it was at less than 25% in '93. The line "not that there's anything wrong with that" was actually added late, for fear of potentially offending the LGBT community - which was the last thing they wanted to do. So, in other words, they weren't satirizing liberalism for forcing acceptance of the LGBT community; they were trying to show acceptance of it themselves. Not only that, this was 28 years ago, when roughly only one-quarter of the country approved of gay-marriage. That number is up to 70% today. So, in other words, the contention that society was being forced to accept the LGBT community at this juncture is preposterous. That notion is preposterous today as well, but especially then. Try again, homophobes. Try again...
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