In case there are still any doubts X-Men 3 is about exgays:
[Ian McKellen] has been openly gay since the 1980s, and he takes exception to the common assumption that homosexuals can be ‘cured.’ So he channeled his fury into the role of Magneto.Speaking at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday McKellen vented, “As a gay man, some people think that it ought to be cured and made normal again and I find it as offensive as someone saying that they have a cure for the color of their skin.
Read the full story. (Hat tip Scott)
The irony being that in the first movie Magneto was sort of attempting to recruit people into the mutant lifestyle with his funky magnet machine.
Well…yeah, Boo.
But good for Sir Ian anyway.
Apparently, the folks at AFA don’t quite see it the same way.
Remaking Man in Our Own Image:
C.S. Lewis’ Conditioners and the World of X-Men 3: The Last Stand…
By Dr. Marc T. Newman
…amidst the mayhem it still raises significant questions about the making of moral decisions in a culture that has abandoned God, the threat of Conditioners to remake humans in their own image, and the need to reassert a transcendent vision of humanity if we are ever to survive the technologizing of the West…
X-Men 3 frames the dilemma that pervades the film in an early scene. Professor Xavier, who runs the School for Gifted Children – a kind of Mutant U – is conducting a discussion about ethics in which he challenges his charges to try to determine where is the line between a responsible use of their power and tyranny over those who are weaker than they. In response, one of the students paraphrases this quotation from Albert Einstein: “I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it.”…
The problems faced in the fantasy world of X-Men 3 are merely our own problems writ large. While Professor Xavier is wrestling with the philosophical and theological question of whether the mutants should do certain things, over at Worthington Laboratories scientists are simply determining whether or not they can do what they want – which is to genetically modify mutants to neutralize their special abilities. What begins as a voluntary offer to “cure” the mutants so that they will “fit in” with the rest of the culture, quickly escalates to a forceful, mandatory kind of ethnic cleansing.
I had no idea that the “technologizing of the West” was a bad thing, but the inability to see the parallels to the “ex-gay” movement is truly interesting to me.
link: https://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/5/afa/262006g.asp