Nearly a quarter of a century after she became a pioneer in the push for civility toward gays and lesbians, Ellen DeGeneres found herself at the forefront of a new kind of culture war. The very online Left took umbrage at the talk show host’s jovial appearance with former President George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys football game over the weekend. And in a very on-brand twist, DeGeneres addressed with issue head on.
Rather than detail the most unsavory of the criticism — chief among them, Parker Molloy of Media Matters branding Bush a “war criminal” and excoriating his past positions on gay marriage — DeGeneres used one part sincerity and two parts comedy to describe the ethos guiding her decision to deem Bush her “friend” in the first place.
“Here’s the thing,” DeGeneres said on her 61-Emmy Award winning daytime show. “I’m friends with George Bush. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of people who don’t share the same beliefs that I have. We’re all different. And I think that we’ve forgotten that that’s OK that we’re all different.”
“But just because I don’t agree with someone on everything doesn’t mean that I’m not going to be friends with them,” she continued. “When I say be kind to one another, I don’t mean only the people that think the same way that you do.”
She didn’t make a single mention of or quote Molloy, who was responsible for bringing all the trolls out from under their bridges in the first place to attack Ellen and fellow cast members such as Andy Lassner. And then, just like that, the employee of Media Matters — which only exists nowadays to comb through old tweets to cancel the “wrong sort” of people from civil society — deleted every single one of her tweets except for one announcing that she was giving herself a time-out from Twitter.
I’m sure this and the wiping of your entire twitter account has nothing to do with the backlash to your needless dragging of @TheEllenShow for, god forbid, hanging out with a Republican. https://t.co/cTnTpK4NNh
— Natalie Johnson (@nataliejohnsonn) October 8, 2019
Our annoyance today with cancel culture is surely superseded by the gay and lesbian experiences of previous decades. But that DeGeneres has inadvertently found herself at the forefront of both is telling. The comedienne is universally beloved in the model of Johnny Carson more than any contemporary figure other, save for maybe Oprah Winfrey. And now it had to be DeGeneres once again who stood up to keyboard warriors keen on sowing their incivility in one of the last polite public squares of daytime television.
When Aaron Calvin at the Des Moines Register attempted to cancel Carson King — the Iowa man who accidentally raised millions of dollars and then donated it all to a children’s hospital — for two inappropriate tweets from his teenage years, sane and outraged netizens bullied the bullies right back, mapping out a blueprint for how normal folks can resist cancel culture. DeGeneres just showed how an individual, albeit an A-list celebrity, can restore and further inculcate civility culture. That didn’t start with her brushing over her political differences and focusing on their presumable mutual disdain for the current president, but rather with her acknowledging that they can differ on policy preferences and still have respect for each other’s humanity. It’s similar to the blueprint of normalizing homosexuality across Middle America that DeGeneres used to such monumental success. She smiled rather than persecuted, and it worked.
DeGeneres quoted a tweet on-air that claimed the clip with her and Bush made the writer “have faith in America again.” With her insistence on catching flies with honey instead of vinegar, DeGeneres just gave us faith once more.
