Disney’s Disenchanted Kingdom Versus Parental Rights

Courtesy: the Catholic League

A Catholic League documentary film exposes the radical Disney descent into woke politics and child indoctrination and a flagrant disregard for parental rights.

January 18, 2023 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Beyond These Stone Walls merited two citations in the “In the News” section of the December 2022 issue of Catalyst, the Journal of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Seeing this blog cited as a news source among venues like Catholic News Service, Catholic World Report, and Newsmax did little to bolster my New Year’s resolution to foster humility.

Also in that same issue of Catalyst, President Bill Donohue wrote about a documentary film produced by the Catholic League entitled, “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney is Losing its Way.” In a brief but important article, “Why We Did the Disney Movie,” Bill Donohue laid out a compelling case for its necessity:

“Over the years, beginning in the 1990s, Disney turned against its family-friendly image, making and distributing fare that sharply broke with its moorings. I know this because one of the first big victories I had was in 1995 when I confronted Disney senior officials, ordering them out of the headquarters of the New York Archdiocese where we were located at that time. The occasion was the movie, “Priest,” a diabolical film that featured totally dysfunctional priests, all of whose problems were a function of their priesthood.”

The Catholic-bashing Disney film was distributed by Miramax, a company owned by Harvey Weinstein, now in prison for a series of sexual offenses. Then, according to Dr. Donohue, “Disney/Miramax did one anti-Catholic film after another.”

In March of 2022, Disney released a statement condemning a Florida bill that barred teaching students about sexual and gender identity issues from kindergarten to grade three. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the bill into law recognizing that parental rights are being disregarded when a media company takes on the parental role of sex education, especially when such content targets children ages five to eight. Who could possibly have objected to such a bill?

The Disney franchise did. At first its then-CEO, Bob Chapek, decided to steer clear of the controversy, but then he caved in under a barrage of pressure from Disney’s “woke” employees who dubbed Florida’s effort to protect parental rights as the “don’t say gay” bill. I wrote a multi-faceted post with a segment about this story that many also found shocking. Here are excerpts:

“Disney world has been in the news lately, but not for anything that contributes anything to the common good. In early 2022, following waves of parental anxiety over “woke” trends in education, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill restricting schools from teaching about gender identity and sexual orientation from kindergarten to the third grade. In a bizarre twist for a corporation counting on Florida for success, Disney CEO Bob Chapek launched a corporate protest of the law.

“Supporters of the law said it was aimed at asserting more parental control over content in the classroom, a trend that swept the nation after a former Governor of Virginia declared last year that parents should have no say in what is taught in schools. The loudest reaction from parents has been revealed at the voting polls. Some of the most liberal school board members in some of the most liberal Democrat-led cities across the nation have since been voted out of office.”

Disney in La La Land

If you think the Florida law squashes legitimate debate about public policy, it does nothing of the kind. It simply limits classroom indoctrination about sexual and gender identity issues from kindergarten to grade three. This should need no defense. The law also requires that curriculum on these topics in subsequent grades must be age-appropriate. Governor DeSantis defended the new law amid an onslaught of “woke” protests:

“You’ve seen a lot of sloganeering and fake narratives by leftist politicians, by activists, and by corporate media. We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, healthcare and well-being of their children.”

I wrote in another post that the Disney franchise was not always on board with its current woke agenda. Walt Disney himself went to an opposite extreme. One of my favorite movies as a child was the Disney production of Old Yeller which left an entire generation of children and teens in tears around 1960. Disney star, Tommy Kirk played a frontier teen forced to euthanize his beloved dog. Tommy Kirk went on to play the starring role in another Disney box office blockbuster, The Shaggy Dog, and again in Swiss Family Robinson.

On sets, Walt Disney introduced Tommy as “our moneymaker.” Then, at age 21, Kirk was seen holding hands at poolside with another teen boy. Walt Disney personally had him escorted off the set and his career with Disney came to an end. In his 20s, Kirk tried to revive his career with a few unmemorable productions, and then he read the writing on the wall. After recovering from addiction, he ran a small business in obscurity for most of his life and died in his 70s in 2020.

Walt Disney did not necessarily harbor prejudice. He simply knew that the public face of Disney’s entertainment empire should not also be the face of controversial social issues. So how would Walt Disney respond today to the spectacle that unfolded earlier last year in Florida?

A half century after Tommy Kirk was expelled from Disney, a reader sent me a message in 2022 suggesting that I should watch a made-for-TV Disney Film called “Under Wraps 2.” I did so with reluctance. The plot was both simple and simple-minded. A group of three middle school students discovered a pair of Egyptian mummies in a museum, assisted in bringing them back to life, attended a party with them, and then the movie ended with the kids jubilantly in the front row at a same-sex wedding which had nothing to do with the rest of the ridiculous plot.

It was clearly meant for indoctrination, and its message was also clear. If Corporate Disney could not foster such indoctrination in schools, it would do so on television, the next largest arena where impressionable children gather, often without parental awareness. In Disney’s contemporary films, the kids are portrayed as the only people who know what is going on while adults — especially parents — are portrayed as disconnected and generally clueless.

Tolerance, respect for human rights, and justice for all people are desirable goals for every society, but there is a gaping chasm between such a noble effort and the sweeping woke demands for schools to teach and promote LGBTQ and gender identity issues as a natural, even preferable evolution in human development that contributes to the common good. The “common good” is the most abused and debatable part of this discussion. I once wrote a post on the special handling of presenting this subject as normative. It was an eye-opener for many entitled, “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”

In its public opposition to a common sense law, Corporate Disney descended into La La Land and is out of touch with the currents of parental rights and responsibilities. Disney’s dive into the culture war should raise alarms for stockholders whose concerns for Disney’s bottom line might dwarf its woke agenda. It should also raise alarms for parents whose children are lured from parental influence by sexual indoctrination made enticing to children by mixing it with heavy doses of glitter and fun.

Courtesy: the Catholic League

Waking up the Woke

Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek initiated a public dispute with Governor DeSantis over Florida's common sense measure. Mr. Chapek and Disney World were on the wrong side of public policy and parental rights in this. The Walt Disney franchise can only be harmed by this oblivious descent into suppressing parental rights. I predicted such a development in another post, “The ‘Woke’ Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education .”

Former long term Disney CEO Bob Iger, frustrated at the lack of response to the new Florida bill, tweeted, “If passed, this bill will put vulnerable young LGBTQ people in jeopardy.” Was Mr. Iger referring to LGBTQ kindergarten students? The absurdity of the statement was left dangling. According to an extended article on the Disney debacle in The Wall Street Journal (Disney Endgame Dec. 17-18, 2022) Mr. Iger had embraced Disney’s drift into progressive politics more than his successor. The tweet caused Mr. Chapek to change course and refute the Florida Bill.

The resultant public controversy took a toll on the Disney bottom line. By September 2021, the company had lost 45% of its stock value, but its corporate responsibility to shareholders became subordinate to what the WSJ described as “the company’s support of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender causes.”

In response to all this, Bill Donohue recruited the interest of Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. Together they sought a meeting with Disney CEO Bob Chapek who ignored them. In the Catholic League documentary, former Disney writers reveal how the modern Disney franchise sexualizes children including “a history of exposing its young actors ... to grooming with gay and transgender messaging.” Disney's latest animated film, “Strange World,” depicts “the first openly gay teen romance in a children's movie.”

Of interest, one of the global moneymakers in the Disney franchise is Disney Shanghai. With close friends in Shanghai, I have photographs of their family outing at this newest and sprawling Disney theme park. Disney is careful not to let the same woke value judgments invade Shanghai because the Chinese Communist Party would not tolerate it. As Bill Donohue points out, Disney will accommodate China while ignoring polls in the U.S. revealing that “seventy-five percent of American voters say that targeting underage minors in a transgender movement has gone too far.”

In recent developments, CEO Bob Chapek has been fired by the Disney Board of Directors while former CEO Bob Iger has returned for another stint as Disney CEO. Disney’s stock valuation had taken a major hit. A recent extended article in The Wall Street Journal explores these developments at Disney but hints that its returning CEO leans even further left than Chapek. This does not bode well for navigating the company out of the quagmire of one-sided progressive politics into which it has descended.

Check the Catholic League website for information on the release of “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom” and a trailer. The documentary features prominent cultural and media commentators including Director Jason Meath, Dr. Bill Donohue, Tony Perkins, Mercedes Schlapp, Dr. Ben Carson, Miranda Devine, Brent Bozell, David Horowitz, and Washington Times Film Critic, Christian Toto.

I wonder what the late Tommy Kirk might think today about the Disney drift to the opposite extreme of LGBTQ concerns. One need not travel back more than a few decades to find a parade of young actors used, used up and discarded by Corporate Disney. Remember Bobby Driscoll? He found stardom as Jim Hawkins in the 1950s blockbuster Disney production of Treasure Island. Bobby died from drug addiction in his early thirties after spending much of his youth anonymously discarded on skid row.

“What father among you would hand his son a stone if he asks for a fish?” (Matthew 7:10). What parent among you would take a cue from Disney on the education and raising of your child?

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The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights has released its 50-minute documentary film exposing “Walt’s Disenchanted Kingdom: How Disney Is Losing Its Way.” This film is a must-see for anyone concerned about the erosion of parental rights in the woke indoctrination of children. Watch the Catholic League documentary here.

Editor’s Note: The December 2022 issue of the Catholic League Journal, Catalyst also profiles and recommends a new book by Stephen Krason, a member of the Catholic League Board of advisors who teaches political science at Franciscan University. His book gathers a stellar group of scholars who address, Parental Rights in Peril published by Catholic University Press.

Thank you for reading and sharing this important post. You may also like these related posts from Fr. Gordon MacRae at Beyond These Stone Walls:

The “Woke” Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix

After Roe v. Wade, Hope for Life and a Nation’s Soul

The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade

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One of our Patron Saints, Saint Maximilian Kolbe, founded a religious site in his native Poland called Niepokalanowa. The site has a real-time live feed of its Adoration Chapel with Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. We invite you to spend some some time before the Lord in a place that holds great spiritual meaning for us.

Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.

As you can see the monstrance for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is most unusual. It is an irony that all of you can see it but I cannot. So please remember me while you are there. For an understanding of the theology behind this particular monstrance of the Immaculata, see my post “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”

To Vanquish Evil, and Disney in La La Land

Writing on current events behind and beyond these stone walls Fr. Gordon MacRae presents ‘Archangel Michael Atop My Prison Door’ and ‘From Disneyland to La La Land.’

April 27, 2022 by Fr. Gordon MacRae

Pigeon poop! I apologize in advance for such an inauspicious beginning to an otherwise respectable post, but that is in fact how this story began. In the weeks before Holy Week this year, a nasty norovirus raged through this prison with a vengeance. Some prisoners have a bad habit of feeding pigeons who amass inside these walls for a daily feast. Some of the pigeons are so obese from a steady diet of stale bread that it’s a marvel they can still get off the ground. Finally, prison officials banned the practice of feeding them after the pigeons became possible suspects in a recent outbreak of norovirus.

I was just beginning to feel some gratitude that it passed me by, but alas, I was among the last to get it. My own version of it was like the “Big Barrage” at the end of a Disney World fireworks display where the biggest explosions are saved for the end. I will spare you the more gory details, but on the night of April 1st into April 2nd, I spent twelve hours memorizing the patent number on one of our housing unit toilets.

That twelve hours from hell was followed by a few days of overtaxed abdominal muscles and grumbling queasiness, but it’s all behind me now. I always wash my hands many times each day here, and I avoid as much contact with others as I can, but because I am the law clerk in the prison legal library, everyone wants to shake my hand upon arrival. Rather than refuse the gestures, I thought it better to just wash my hands more often.

Anyway, my bout with norovirus is over now so I’ll get to the point. After the early April experience, I found myself with a sudden disdain for pigeons and their calling cards. I cannot see this blog, but in some printed images that were sent to me, I noted an abundance of pigeon remnants beneath the statue of St. Michael the Archangel on our Home Page. It never bothered me until my abdominal apocalypse, but now the pigeon poop was all I could see.

The majestic marble statue, located somewhere in France, was mostly spared by some obviously devout French pigeons, but poor Satan beneath was subjected to relentless pigeon bombardment. It’s not that I have sympathy for Satan. I just wanted all evidence of pigeon fecetiousness gone from my blog. Yes, I know “fecetiousness” is not a word, but it should be.

So as Holy Week loomed, I asked our editor if we could possibly replace the image of St. Michael on our Home Page with one less ... um, decorative. My only condition was that I wanted St. Michael to stay. He is, after all, the Patron Saint of Justice and I wasn’t about to let him fly off with the pigeons.

The only problem was in selecting a replacement from among the thousands of statues, sculptures, paintings, sketches, and stained glass depictions of Archangel Michael. I could be no help in choosing one because I cannot see any of what our editor sees while preparing this blog for publication. Seeking an inspiring one, she settled on an 1850s painting by French artist, Eugene Delacroix entitled, “Saint Michael Overcoming Satan.” It hangs in the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris. So sight unseen I asked for that one because I attended a Sulpician seminary, St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore, the oldest Pontifical Institute in the United States.

Our new Home Page was up on Palm Sunday, but it was the middle of Holy Week before I could see a copy of it. I was astonished because that very same image — one of thousands of Saint Michael images from which our editor could have chosen — has been above the door on the inside of my prison cell for twelve years. It was put there by Alberto Ramos, a young man I wrote about in “Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being.”

In a phone call to Thailand this week, I told Pornchai Moontri this story. He recalled being bombarded by a pigeon in the prison yard while sitting next to me watching a basketball game two summers ago. He assumes now that the pigeon was actually aiming for me. More importantly, Pornchai was astonished by the St. Michael story. He was present in our cell in 2010 when our friend, Alberto silently climbed up onto the sink to tape that same image of St. Michael on the lintel above our door.

“Never take this down,” Alberto said. Having been in prison since age 14, he knew only too well the underworld currents of evil that drift through here by osmosis. He wanted the Patron Saint of Hope and Justice to be the last thing we see before venturing out our door into the prison world beyond.

When Pornchai and I were moved to another place seven years later in 2017, I climbed up to carefully remove Alberto’s St. Michael image for placement above our new cell door where it remains to this day. It is now also the same image that welcomes visitors to Beyond These Stone Walls. The full story of Saint Michael and why Alberto put him above my prison door is told in one of our most popular posts, “Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed.”

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From Disneyland to La La Land

You may have noticed that I mentioned Disney World in our first entry for this double post. Disney World has been in the news lately, but not for anything that contributes anything to the common good. Following some currents of parental anxiety over “woke” trends in education, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill restricting public schools from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten to the third grade. In a bizarre twist for a corporation counting on Florida for its success, Disney World protests that decision.

Supporters of the bill say it was aimed at asserting more parental control over content in the classroom, a trend that swept the nation after a Democratic former Governor of Virginia declared last year that parents should have no say in what is taught in schools. That is why he is still a “former” Governor of Virginia. The loudest reaction came at the polls. Some of the most liberal school board members in some of the most liberal Democratic-led cities are now also voted out of office.

Lest you think this Florida bill squashes legitimate debate about public policy, it does nothing of the kind. It simply limits classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through grade three, a development that should need no defense. The law also requires that information in subsequent grades must be age appropriate. The bill allows parents to sue school districts that do not comply. Governor DeSantis defended the new law amid an onslaught of “woke” protests:

“You’ve seen a lot of sloganeering and fake narratives by leftist politicians, by activists, and by corporate media. We will continue to recognize that in the state of Florida, parents have a fundamental role in the education, healthcare and wellbeing of their children.”

Tolerance, respect for human rights, and justice for all people are desirable goals for every society, but there is a gaping chasm between such a noble effort and woke demands for education to teach and promote LGBT and gender identity issues as an evolution in human development that contributes to the common good. The “common good” is the most abused and debatable part of this discussion. I once wrote a post on the special handling of this subject that was an eye-opener for many. It was entitled “Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix.”

Disney’s Falling Stars

Disney executives are likely aware that the history of their own company was not always on board with the current woke trend. Just a few months ago, there was an obscure story buried in the news media about Tommy Kirk. If his name rings no bells, his most memorable acting role probably will. The entire nation shed tears in the 1960s while watching him as a teen movie icon compelled to euthanize his beloved dog in the blockbuster Disney film, Old Yeller. I was ten years old then, and overcome with grief.

Tommy Kirk went on in adolescence and young adulthood to make a few more big box office Disney films such as The Shaggy Dog, Swiss Family Robinson, and The Absent Minded Professsor, but none were quite as memorable as Old Yeller. Walt Disney introduced him to a film director then as “My Moneymaker.”

Then, at age 21, Tommy Kirk was seen holding hands with another young man near a Disneyland pool. Walt Disney ordered Kirk to be escorted from Disney property and fired. Kirk was blackballed and ruined as an actor. He went on in young adulthood to struggle with addiction. He died in 2021 having gotten his life together running a small business in obscurity.

I wonder what Tommy Kirk might think today about the Disney drift to the polar opposite extreme of LGBT concerns. One need not travel back more than a few decades to find a parade of young actors used, used up, and discarded by Corporate Disney. Remember Bobby Driscoll? He found stardom as Jim Hawkins in the 1959 blockbuster Disney production of Treasure Island. Bobby Driscoll died from drug addiction in his early thirties after spending much of his youth anonymously discarded on skid row.

In its public opposition to a common sense law, Corporate Disney has descended into La La Land and is out of touch with the currents of parental rights and discourse. Disney’s dive into the culture war should raise alarms for stockholders whose concerns for Disney’s bottom line might dwarf its woke agenda.

It should also raise alarms for parents whose children are lured from parental influence by a woke agenda mixed with heavy doses of glitter and fun.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Chapek initiated a public dispute with Governor DeSantis over Florida’s common sense measure. Mr. Chapek and Disney World are on the wrong side of public policy and parental rights in this. The Walt Disney franchise can only be harmed by this oblivious descent into the woke politics of our time and their insistence on suppressing parental rights. I predicted such a development in another post, The “Woke” Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education.

Since then, the Florida Senate and House of Representatives both voted to rescind a decades-old agreement allowing self-government for Disney World and tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks.

“What father among you would hand his son a stone if he asks for a fish?” (Matthew 7:10). What parent among you would take a cue from Disney on the education of your child?

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Note from Father Gordon MacRae: Please visit our “Special Events” Page for our announcement about Easter Season posts leading up to Pentecost, and for information on our aiding our refugee project in Thailand.

You may also like the related titles linked in this week’s post:

Why You Must Never Give Up Hope for Another Human Being

Angelic Justice: St. Michael the Archangel and the Scales of Hesed

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and the Homosexual Matrix

The “Woke” Have Commenced Our Totalitarian Re-Education