Last week, ABC upset many faithful Catholics with the release of the new trailer for their upcoming sit-com The Real O'Neals, which contained some of the most mean-spirited, anti-Catholic material since Family Guy aired the episode "The 2,000 Year Old Virgin" in December last year.
The anti-Catholic spirit on display throughout the three-minute trailer, which mocks everything Catholics hold sacred from sexual chastity to the Blessed Virgin Mary, comes as no surprise to anyone, considering that radical gay activist and Christian-basher Dan Savage serves as one of the show's producers.
Employing some of the most tired clichés on the books regarding Christianity, the show presents a completely clueless "typical Irish Catholic family" who, of course, don't practice what they preach and who know absolutely nothing about sex. A family in which the father exclaims "I can't have meat and potatoes for every meal, not 'til I'm in heaven," while ordering at a restaurant and in which the mother – played by 80's veteran Martha Plimpton – puts a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary over the toilet so that people would remember to put the seat down. A family in which the son knows nothing about contraception and the daughter collects money for charity so she can fatten her own wallet.
Priests don't look like they'll get much fair play either, with the trailer presenting one as a money-hoarding hypocrite who brags about his "vow of poverty" while simultaneously owning a Lexus.
Of course, no show or movie bashing Christians could ever be complete without the standard, straight off-the-shelf closeted gay son – here played by Noah Galvin – who courageously comes out to his bigoted family after failing to have sex with his girlfriend when he cluelessly flushes a box of condoms down the toilet. He is the only sympathetic character presented on the show - a victim of his backward, archaic religion.
The trailer reaches its mean-spirited low point when the daughter asks a waitress to donate her tips to "poor children in Ethiopia," and her mother passive-aggressively says, "don't be pushy, it's her soul that's going to hell if she doesn't give you money."
Dan Savage, himself a former Catholic, has stated in the past that he intended the show to reflect his childhood, and if that's the case, then he could use some prayer. He has publicly bashed Catholicism and Christianity in general on multiple occasions and, most recently, challenged 2016 presidential candidate Ben Carson to "suck my d*ck" in order to prove that homosexuality is a choice. He has also called for "mandatory abortion" and wished that "Republicans were all f*cking dead."
Yes, Disney's ABC gave that guy a sitcom.
