‘Viral’ Catholic petition against a gay Hallmark Christmas movie turns out to be fake
One of this year’s Hallmark Christmas movie offerings – ‘Holiday Date’. (Hallmark)
A Catholic news site launched a petition against a hypothetical Hallmark Christmas movie featuring a same-sex couple and claimed it had gone “viral” with 25,000 signatures. This turned out to not be the case.
Last month, Hallmark was widely criticised for not featuring a single LGBT+ character in a leading role in any of the 40 Christmas movies it was releasing for this year’s holiday season.
However, executives at Hallmark’s parent company Crown Media told The Wrap that they were “looking at pitches for LGBTQ movies”, and in an interview last week the CEO of Hallmark said the company is “open” to LGBT+ representation.
In response, the Catholic anti-abortion news outlet LifeSiteNews started a petition against the hypothetical future film, to “keep sex and sexual practices – including the promotion of homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. – out of their movies”.
The petition continued: “Hallmark would be offending Christian viewers and Christian parents BIG TIME, by experimenting with homosexual themes, and, or cooperating with the LGBT indoctrination agenda, at all… Hallmark should also know that if they give-in to the LGBT agenda, the LGBT activists will never be satisfied.
“They will always want Hallmark to be pushing more and more aberrant views and characters. That doesn’t sound like a very fun Christmas movie at all!”
LifeSiteNews claimed that the anti-LGBT+ petition “gained more than 25,000 signatures in less than one day”.
It added: “As this viral petition demonstrates, there is very little demand for Christmas movies with an LGBT theme. Quite to the contrary, there is significant opposition to the idea.”
But the petition might not be so “viral” after all.
According to Out, people (or bots) are able to sign the petition as many times as they want, as long as they use a different name and email address, meaning that the numbers are likely to have been “grossly inflated”.
At the time of writing, the petition has allegedly been signed by 33,327 people.
