Blue Bloods Lets Me Down

By: American Decency Staff

In the vast programming wasteland, replete with mind-numbing sitcoms and brain-killing reality shows – all leaning sharply towards the left – there are few oasis of conservative, let alone Christian, thought to be found on the television screen. Where it is found, it's generally viewed as an odd life-style on par with polygamy or people who get lots of tattoos or eat couch foam – it deserves a reality show, so that all the normal people can peer through the fish bowl.

Of the few options that are not reality shows, NBC's Blue Bloods has been a consistent favorite for my wife and me.

If you have not seen the crime drama, you would most likely be pleasantly surprised. It features Tom Selleck and his mustache as New York City's police commissioner Frank Reagan, his two police officer sons and his Assistant District Attorney daughter. It's not perfect, the show alludes to the romantic lives of the Reagan family, but that is as tawdry as it gets. Every episode has more or less the same moral – do the right thing even when it's hard – which it delivers while examining the challenges of police, like accusations of brutality and corruption. There's even a stand in for Al Sharpton in the character of corrupt Rev. Potter.

Every episode features the family praying around the table at Sunday dinner and treats the family's devout Catholic faith very respectfully.

I was curious then, when my favorite TV show began with an officer being outed as a homosexual after he witnessed a stabbing at a gay bar. How would Blue Bloods treat homosexuality and it's incompatibility with the characters' ingrained Catholic faith?

Commissioner Reagan took the podium at a press conference and was of course asked how he reconciled his faith with the fact that there homosexual officers working under him.

He answered appropriately, “it's not my business,” and I breathed a sigh of relief; you can't expect much better than that under today's amoral standards. If TV shows must feature story lines with homosexuals, why can't they just leave it at that instead of shoving it down the viewers throats?

But my relief was short lived – Reagan ruined the moment with his next line, “but I do think the Catholic Church is a little behind the times.”

Alas, the Commissioner let me down!

But he didn't just let me down, he let his friend, the archbishop, down. The church asked Frank Reagan to retract his remarks, but he just couldn't because he knew he was so right.

And so, (I'm not making this up) the archbishop closed the Catholic school that Reagan was lobbying him to keep open at the request of a distraught nun, who it turns out, was a lesbian before she became a nun and she doesn't regret that a bit. She thanked Reagan for standing on his principles even though her school will be closed and that's the end of the show.

Literally, of the three “good Catholics” portrayed in the episode, two of them support homosexuality and the third is portrayed as a monster who takes away the children's school because it's not making money and because his friend won't support traditional marriage.

Of course, I expect this from TV by this point, but from a show like Blue Bloods, which more often than not promotes a moral code I can agree with and can even inspire me to be a better person, the slap in the face still stings.

But it is a fresh reminder of the world we live in. We may believe whatever we want, so long as we accept the “new normal.” We can preach honesty and justice and courage and responsibility. But we may not speak against homosexuality and be seen as a “good guy.” Blue Bloods even takes a conservative stance on issues like racism in the police force, but no quarter can be granted to those who will not affirm homosexuality.

Indeed, even as a conference for Biblical counselors meets on a seminary campus to discuss how to counsel people who have same sex attractions Biblically, they are being protested by those who would not allow the church to call sinners to repentance if the sin in question is homosexuality.

Doug Wilson wrote a post on his blog recently in typical snarky Doug Wilson form about those protestors.

The protesters say that being gay is not a broken condition and does not require fixing. But they go much further than this. They also clearly believe that being gay is something you have to be required by law NOT to fix or change. In fact, you may not be permitted even to try.

They want us, under the right circumstances, meaning circumstances that favor their agenda, to believe that our sexualities are fluid, plastic, malleable. But once you arrive in the world of the transgressive letters, the LGB,ETC, the fluidity of all things somehow sticks there. You can bounce around among the naughty letters as much as you want, and maybe even get a book deal, but you cannot go back to S. That might remind somebody of reparative therapy. This is because going back to straight reminds everybody too much of repentance, and anything that reminds Americans of repentance must be strictly outlawed.

He continues, and I will allow him to not only drive home the problem, but present the Christian's correct response.

A society as rebelliously muddled as ours is a society that cannot survive. Unintelligibility is not a marching creed, and incoherence is not a governing philosophy. When the center cannot hold, everything falls apart. When the center does not hold, we will all discover how many things the center was in fact holding.

Turns out there was a lot of water behind that dam we blew up.

Now when I say that America cannot survive, I do not mean that we have to be destroyed by flaming mile-wide asteroids from Heaven. No. Stupid cultures are quite capable of going out with a whimper. Societies that have been blinded by a judicial blindness from God are societies that are — follow me closely here — blind.

And so long as you are blind, you cannot see the way of escape. But blindness or no, I will declare it regardless. Jesus Christ was crucified for all these lusts and many more like them, and then He rose from the dead. He is therefore the Lord and Savior of this misbegotten nation. If He wants to forgive us, there is no way for us to stop it.

Not only are those without Christ blind, God’s Word tells us that they are dead.  A blind man is incapable of seeing the light.  A dead man cannot rise to new life.   Yet God, by His grace, is the only One who can remove the darkness and give new birth.

“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins  in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.  But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,  even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved”.   ~ Ephesians 2:1-5

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