It’s Been a Busy Week
Not to jump ahead, but John Oliver bookended Sunday’s Last Week Tonight with current symbols of Chicago pride. Up front, he joined those congratulating the Windy City for being the birthplace of newly elected Pope Leo XIV, aka Robert Prevost, aka “some guy named Bob from Chicago.” Noting Chicagoans’ pride in claiming the Catholic Church’s first-ever American pope, Oliver suggested that hopes/fears that “Pope Bob” would make ketchup on hot dogs a matter of church doctrine and a certain meat-based Chicago delicacy the new eucharist were probably unfounded.
He did, however, join those speculating that the new pope has definitely done shots of Malört, Chicagoans’ longtime favorite alcoholic spirit/”city-wide hazing ritual.” And while the fine folks at Malört describe their beverage as “a traditional wormwood-based digestif,” Oliver himself suggested it tastes more like “something a Batman villain would spike the water supply with.” To prove his point, he closed out this Sunday’s Last Week Tonight by doing a shot of the stuff, making the sort of face afterward that one might make after, say, reporting on one powerful group’s decades-long campaign to eliminate all protections for LGBTQ+ people from American law.
We’ll get there, but before then Oliver did a brief survey of Donald Trump’s new obsession with dolls. Who plays with them (apparently “beautiful baby girls” ranging in age from 7 to 15), how many of them said girls really need come Christmas (less than 30, but maybe more than one), and how his ongoing trade war will impact the purchase thereof.
As Oliver noted, aping Trump’s signature stream-of-let’s-call-it-consciousness rant, it’s all part of Trump’s master plan, as is his shaky grasp of when “beautiful baby girls” like to play with dolls. And while Oliver noted, “Every single way this man refers to girls makes my skin want to turn inside out,” he put a bow on his opening segment by noting, “Is Trump’s stupid trade war about to hurt a lot of people? Well, is the pope Catholic, and now also some guy named Bob from Chicago?”
And Now This…
For his first palate cleanser of the night, Oliver stayed with dolls, throwing to Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade’s totally not -defensive on-air obsession with defending the fact that, as a lad, he played with dolls. Of course, those were action figures, dammit, what with their “real hair” and “kung fu grip,” no matter how much it sounds like Kilmeade’s parents shamed him for innocently wanting to enter a carefree world of imagination with his toy friends free from prejudice and gendered preconceptions.
Nowadays, and in no way representing a deep-seated traumatic scarring caused by such rigidly enforced family gender roles, Kilmeade asserts again and again that he only asked for a Ken doll that one time so that his G.I. Joe’s could “make a man out of him.” You know, like a totally well-adjusted adult male does.
Our Main Story Tonight
Moving on to the pre-Malört main course of the show, John Oliver got winsome. Oh wait, that’s the favorite adjective employed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative “Christian rights” organization involved in decades of anti-gay legislation covering everything from repealing anti-discrimination protections, banning birth control and gay sex, banning gay adoption and marriage, conflating gayness with bestiality and pedophilia, and more. Of course that’s not how the ADF describes their actions.
As Oliver noted, the ADF calls itself a legal defense fund for Christians discriminated against for being Christian, the reality being a whole lot less noble and innocent than they’d have people believe. Playing training videos used to shape lawyers, witnesses, and plaintiffs’ testimonies, Oliver showed how that word, “winsome” is key to ADF messaging. The dictionary defines “winsome” as “generally pleasing and engaging often because of a childlike charm and innocence.” The Alliance Defending Freedom, however, is exposed by Oliver as manipulative, bigoted, and insidious in its actions, all words that are a lot harder to peddle to the public.
“Winsome” tactics Oliver showed the ADF using include lying, like when they had ADF spokeswoman Kristen Waggoner (who gave away her Disney memorabilia after that company defended gay rights) deploying her teenage daughter to testify that her high school softball team was beaten and demoralized when an opposing team’s trans player took the diamond. Only, as Oliver noted, that team had no trans player, only a biological girl singled out because she had short hair and was very good at softball. Meanwhile, at no time did Waggoner’s daughter reveal that she was less a downtrodden high school athlete victimized by the evil trans agenda and more a covert ADF operative and “ultimate transphobic nepo baby.”
Then there’s the study cited by ADF senior executive Ken Fletcher in another anti-trans speech at a public forum which claimed that “98 percent” of trans-identifying children grow out of their “phase” once they pass puberty. Only that widely cited study comes from a fringe pediatric activist group whose statistic is pulled from an obscure 1987 book titled The Sissy Boy Syndrome.
Such winsome lies are all part of the well-funded ADF’s game plan. As Oliver notes, the group routinely advises, coaches, and even writes anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in order to force cases in front of a now bigot-friendly Supreme Court, shopping dubious cases from circuit to circuit until one of them bites. Although not to according to the ADF’s PR team, naturally, as Oliver shows a clip of one ADF spokesperson’s interview repeatedly interrupted by an off-camera legal adviser shutting down inquiry into just how intimately the group was involved in writing legislation that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned. As Oliver noted of the spectacle,” stopping your client from answering a question is a great way of making them seem like the guiltiest motherf*cker on Earth.”
As ever, Oliver names names. As he explains, the reason why ADF’s anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns gain traction is because they present themselves as mere defenders of freedom, rather than rabidly anti-gay bigots with deep roots in the right-wing evangelical movement whose officials are sometimes caught on tape touting the philosophy, “Christian love, kill, kill, kill.” Which sounds a lot less winsome, although Oliver concedes is a kickass name for a Christian metal band.
Apart from Kristen Waggoner, Oliver points the Last Week Tonight spotlight on figures like web designer Lorie Smith, whose complaint that she was being forced to create gay wedding sites ran up against the revelation that she simply made up the request she claims violated her rights as a Christian. No matter to the Supreme Court, who ruled in Smith’s ADF-backed favor, over the objections of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who sounded the dissenting alarm that SCOTUS “for the first time in the court’s history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class.” Oliver also noted that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett routinely speaks at ADF training events, although certainly that has no bearing on Barrett’s impartial interpretation of the law. Almost certainly.
So what’s to be done about this deceptive organization actively trying to strip away LGBTQ+ rights under the cover of a well-scrubbed, carefully manicured public image of just sticking up for those persecuted American Christians? Not much, Oliver conceded, noting the current makeup of the government and the courts. You know, except perhaps to devote an entire segment of your award-winning TV show to exposing the stomach-churning tactics of the ADF. As Oliver noted, sometimes his mission is simply to strip the mask from a group that’s tried to put “a misleadingly friendly face on what is an utterly hateful ideology.”
And Now This…
Oliver’s second interlude once more checked in on former MLB slugger and current Philadelphia Phillies color man John Kruk. This time, the unfiltered broadcaster mused on umpires’ pants (creased trousers are so out), colonoscopies (always a good idea for aging baseball fans), how cool a name Malachi is (just ask the Children of the Corn), and that time a guy got his finger chopped off in a farm accident.
He also tried to scare the bejeezus out of some kids in the next broadcasting booth and commented, “That’s a good shot there,” when the broadcast cut to an umpire bending over to dust off home plate. “Sorry I said that out loud,” Kruk apologized. Never apologize, John. Just keep being you.
Cardus Endus
“Habeus Papam Chicagoan” read the card honoring the election of Pope Leo XIV. And indeed we do have a Chicago Pope, which is almost certainly a new Dick Wolf series in development.
Last Lines Tonight
“So now it appears he thinks that 15-year-old girls are playing with dolls? Has he ever met a 15-year-old girl? That’s a dumb question, of course he has —he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein.”
“‘A beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old?’ Don’t call an 11-year-old that. First, it’s creepy, and second, I promise: You call an 11-year-old girl a baby? She’ll f*cking kill you.”
“Because a spokesperson doesn’t generally chime in like that if the answer to a question is ‘No.’ If someone asked me ‘Were you the one that suggested the Honeycomb cereal monster look like a clump of pubes f*cked Gary Busey?’ And a publicist jumped in to say ‘We can’t address John’s involvement in that,’ you’d be pretty confident I was the brains behind that bush.”
“And while it’s not remotely the point, what would a pedophile cake even be? Legally, I’m apparently not allowed to say it’s a giant wooden cake that Drake jumps out of. So I’m not going to say that. I’m just saying, it’s a weird thing to bring up in the first place.”
on an ADF-backed baker’s dubious cake request claims
“Wow. Not only is that incredibly dark, old-timey homophobia, ‘Male genital organs are a perfect biological fit for female genitals?’ I think there are plenty of women who might say, ‘Perfect fit? I don’t want to be mean, but there is, literally, room for improvement.'”
on one adf speaker’s anti-gay talking points
