A charming suburban couple welcomes a 6-year-old foster daughter on a joyous Christmas Eve. A successful New York lawyer and an ambitious Brooklyn photographer are set up on a blind date by their parents and fall in love, just in time to celebrate Christmas together. One might think that these movies — “Christmas on Cherry Lane” and “Friends and Family Christmas” — are exactly the sort of heartwarming, family-friendly holiday romances that conservative culture warriors would cheer.
But this year on the Hallmark Channel, there’s a plot twist: The main characters are gay. Christmas movies have dominated the family-friendly channel’s winter programming for nearly two decades, with millions of loyal viewers. Last year, Hallmark aired its first Christmas movie with gay central characters. This year, two new movies feature gay and lesbian leading characters. Other movies have supporting LGBTQ characters as well.
The right has attacked mammoth corporations like Budweiser and Target for daring to show support for LGBTQ Americans.
Hallmark’s move is not without risk: This year alone, Republicans introduced hundreds of anti-gay laws across the country, and the right has attacked mammoth corporations like Budweiser and Target for daring to show support for LGBTQ Americans. At The Washington Stand, the news site of the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Council, writer Suzanne Bowdey pines for the old Hallmark as “television’s home for clean, predictable, and endearing romance.” Bowdey notes the 2020 departure of former Hallmark parent company CEO Bill Abbott, who, “frustrated by the company’s decision to take Hallmark in a more progressive direction,” launched the Great American Family Network to counter this supposedly radical turn.
Bowdey seems intent on convincing her readers that it’s Hallmark that’s out of touch with middle American tastes, issuing warnings that other companies that have hopped on the “woke” bandwagon have faced backlash from…
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