Twitter cancels Chris Pratt, his Marvel costars defend him

Marvel bigwigs like James Gunn, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo step in to defend Chris Pratt from a new wave of cancellation.

Chris Pratt has been cancelled. It started with a fairly innocent tweet about Hollywood’s four most illustrious Chrises — Pratt, Hemsworth, Evans and Pine — with a simple caption: “One has to go.” People overwhelmingly voted for Pratt, in large part because of his membership in the Hillsong Church, which has been accused of supporting homophobia.

For now, let’s leave aside the question of whether those accusations have merit and continue with the story. Chris Pratt started to trend on Twitter, more people piled on — as is the style there — and before we knew it, we had a good old-fashioned cancellation on our hands.

We are now in the backlash-to-the-backlash stage of the standard cancellation cycle, where prominent people are coming to Pratt’s defense. In Pratt’s case, it’s people he’s worked with at Marvel Studios, including Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn, who himself was cancelled out of a job a while back (and then rehired).

While Gunn doesn’t dispute the homophobia accusations leveled against Hillsong, he’s saying that Pratt himself is not homophobic.

Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man) took much the same tack:

Mark Ruffalo (Bruce Banner) also weighed in…

…as did Zoe Saldana (Gamora):

Pratt’s colleagues clearly have his back.

Now for the flip side: do the cancellers have a point about Hillsong? While the church does take all kinds, gay people are not allowed to hold leadership positions. At one point the church fired two pastors for being gay, it does not recognize gay marriage, and founder Brian Houston has said that it does “not affirm a gay lifestyle.” It’s also been associated with gay conversion therapy, an unquestionably harmful practice that basically amounts to torture, although it’s backed off that in recent years.

So looking at all that, I don’t think it’s a stretch to call the church homophobic. At best, it’s tolerating LGBTQ people rather than affording them actual respect as whole persons whose “lifestyle” are no more or less valid than anyone else’s. I can’t say I love it.

That said, I’m not a big fan of social media dog-piles, either. Personally, I think it would be great if stars like Pratt weren’t associated with a church that discriminates against gay people, no matter how open and accepting he is in his personal life. (And Hillsong has quite a few celebrity parishioners, including Selena Gomez, Vanessa Hudgens and Justin Bieber.) But at the end of the day, he can worship wear he wants…but I hope he listens to some of the more level-headed critiques coming his way.

These are always complicated issues. What do you make of it?

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