After a century or so of dealing with angry villagers at their gates, studios have gotten pretty good at tuning these people out and just selling the four cardinal sins: sex, drugs, violence and popcorn. The turning point was probably about the time when literacy rates spiked enough that everyone could actually read the book rather than just leaving it to one guy per town. Because anyone familiar with the Old Testament knows it’s 90% sex, drugs and violence in the first place.

Including massive amounts of incest!

But in recent weeks they’ve gone to new lengths. Just this last week Frozen was accused of being gay propaganda created by the devil to convert children into new homosexuals. Aside from the fact that it takes some stretching to even see how one character might be gay, I have it on good authority that my girlfriend and her roommate went to see that movie together and haven’t once made out since. Aside from proving they might be wrong it could also stand as ground on false advertising if these guys keep it up.

“I was promised hot lesbian action involving ice cubes.”

But the real prize winners have to be for the people who protested Paramount and Fox recently over Noah and Cosmos. You see, Paramount had the gall to do a version of Noah’s ark that was filmable while Fox went and tried to teach kids science. But the part that really gets me is that, in both cases, the nutjobs won. I expect crazy to come out of the fundamentalists, but for the studios and their affiliates I’ve gotta ask…

Why let the nuts run the asylum?

So for those of you who aren’t aware, a movie is coming out soon based on Noah’s Ark simply called “Noah”. The project has been in the works for a while and was noteworthy of being filmed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Russell Crowe. This is actually a perfect match since Darren Aronofsky is good at telling stories of people with crazed dedication to a task and Russell Crowe has only two modes: crazed dedication and hitting people in the face with phones.

Being the first biblical story told with a blockbuster budget since the restructuring of the studios back in the 80s, people should probably expect some artistic interpretations to be taken with the material already. In the film, Noah doesn’t ever actually speak to God, he receives visions instead that show him the impending doom. And, like all modern blockbuster adaptations of an origin story, you should expect it to feature the mood, tone and direction of a Christopher Nolan film.

But when the test screenings were shown to audiences, one of the things that started to brew was a general unhappy feeling from some fundamentalist Christians who felt that the story deviated from the original telling. For a minute I wondered if they’d gotten some M Night Shyamalan twist ending where all of the people drowned in God’s hissy fit grew gills and became a race of merfolk. I got excited to see what their complaints were!

Mermaids suggest obvious improvements.

Unfortunately, it seems that the majority of the complaints turned out to involve trying to make the story more interesting than Evan Almighty. It would seem that they added dramatic elements of conflict so that you didn’t have to sit for two hours watching a guy build a boat before seeing if it would sink or not while loaded to capacity with no life boats.

*still had sex and violence

But, of course, the best contribution had to come out of Ken Ham. Now, for some of you that name has to sound familiar. That’s because Ken is one of the more famous nutjobs on the planet right now. This is especially true after his recent attempt to give Bill Nye brain damage via a massive stroke caused by doing this too hard:

Essentially, Ken Ham is the man who intends to single-handedly disprove evolution by demonstration that his evolutionary tree failed to deviate a couple times. To do this he founded “Answers in Genesis” (because it does what Nintendon’t) and the Creation Museum, which is responsible for bringing us this:

This:

And inspiring this:

So when Ken Ham rears his head into a subject, you know that the results are, at the very least, going to be interesting. So, I went through his blog (which I won’t subject you to) and found that he’d had a number of quibbles with things not being completely in line with just what was said in the bible. Most people protesting the movie had said that only major elements need to be lined up and that it needed to be in the spirit of the story rather than the complete substance. But Ken went a step further. Ken decided that, in the course of shooting at biblical inaccuracies, he would throw a little of his own crap into the mix.

So, according to Ken, the accurate way to portray this while following the bible is to show only the “kinds” of animals getting onto the Ark. According to Ham’s crew, kinds means that you’d only have one sort of feline (like a lion) which would give rise to every other kind of feline (including cheetahs, tigers and housecats). This, according to Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum, is how the Ark story works. But let’s take a look at the actual scripture.

“And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.” (Genesis 6:19)

So in that regard, I guess the movie would be closer to the source material than Ken Ham. It does use the term “sort” but that’s not exactly defining things and it seems more emphatic about every living thing of flesh. But, as anyone who has looked into the subject knows, the Old Testament is full of contradictions, so let’s see if there’s anything other than “every living thing” in here.

Wow, that’s even further from Ham’s version than the first one. For anyone not familiar, the terms “clean animal” and “unclean animal” comes up a lot in the Old Testament to basically inform you what is and isn’t allowed to be handled, eaten or sacrificed. And what happens when we start to look into the division?

Clean Animals are land animals that chew the cud and have cloven hooves like cattle, deer, goats, and sheep. Meanwhile, “unclean” animals were animals that didn’t chew cud or have a cloven hoof such as:

Now, already this makes Ken’s story a little shaky because we clearly have all of those still and they didn’t inbreed themselves into oblivion (though the cheetahs kind of bottle-necked). But more stressing is the fact that a man named Ham has ignored the attempted genocide on his porky forefathers.

“traitor”

And so there’s the problem. Under the guise of complaining about “inaccuracy”, Ken Ham has taken this opportunity to shill bullshit of such high quality you could use it to fertilize a new Garden of Eden. But I wouldn’t have even noticed that he had a complaint in the first place if it hadn’t been for Paramount putting a disclaimer on their fucking movie. It’s almost as if letting ignorant people have their way makes them stronger. Which, sadly, brings me to the truly dark event of the week.

It all started out just fine. Seth MacFarlane, likely as an apology for the Cleveland Show, teamed up with Neil deGrasse Tyson to bring back Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. This was a wonderful event, even if the ratings so far have been a little soft. Making sure that kids today get to see that science can be cool is always a plus. But, of course, that requires that they’re allowed to see it. Unfortunately, at least one Fox affiliate decided they shouldn’t see the whole picture.

In what has to be one of the most open handed slaps of all time, a Fox affiliate in Oklahoma decided to cover up a 15 second portion of Cosmos that gave a vague implication to the idea that humans evolved. The official statement is that they made a “mistake”. But see for yourself here.

That was no mistake, it was too perfectly timed and sized. Because here’s what they’d cut out, here’s what they didn’t want their fragile little audience to hear.

“We are newcomers to the Cosmos. Our own story only begins on the last night of the cosmic year … Three and a half million years ago, our ancestors — yours and mine left these traces. We stood up and parted ways from them. Once we were standing on two feet, our eyes were no longer fixated on the ground. Now, we were free to look up and wonder.”

I would have shown you the video, but the embed refuses to cooperate for now (sorry to censor you twice, Neil). But, there you have it, the media playing willful ignorance in order to appease people who complain at them. I understand not wanting to anger your audience, but I’m growing mighty wary of the idea that you will edit something that someone else did in order to prevent a fringe element from becoming irritated. Let’s make it clear here, this is the kind of person that they’re trying to appease.

Extreme case? Yeah. But that’s who they’re afraid of when they cut out a 15 second reflection on the relative infancy of our species in comparison to the universe. Neil deGrasse Tyson put in eloquent and beautiful terms the sheer vastness of space, time and our relative insignificance to it all and they silenced him as he did it. That’s what they’re doing, silencing a man echoing the likes of Carl Sagan in favor of appeasing people who, when you really listen to them, sound like they’re echoing this instead:

Seriously, what the fuck?

(I write books, I hate censorship.)