Next year, Fox will premiere Lucifer (loosely based on the character introduced in the Neil Gaiman comic, The Sandman), in which a British-accented Devil roams Los Angeles and helps the LAPD fight crime—and one extreme Christian advocacy group is already pissed about it.
The American Family Association and their One Million Moms offshoot recently launched a petition calling on Fox to preemptively cancel the series, because it supposedly paints the Prince of Darkness in a positive light and disrespects the Bible.
“FOX has plans to air a new series which will glorify Satan as a caring, likable person in human flesh,” the petition reads. “Previews of the pilot show depict graphic acts of violence, a nightclub featuring scantily-clad women and a demon.”
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The petition on the main AFA website has upwards of 120,000 signatures, while the One Million Moms one has over 15,000 “Concerned Moms” signed on.
The American Family Association is upset about this TV show because of course it is. In early 2013, the Mississippi-based group raged against “Djesus Uncrossed,” a Tarantino-spoofing Saturday Night Live sketch in which a gun-toting Jesus Christ embarks on a blood-soaked rampage against Roman enemies. (They didn’t like how SNL treated Jesus.) The conservative Christian-values organizations has also called for barring Muslims from serving in the military. AFA radio broadcasts typically focus on subjects such as how science has concluded that homosexuality is bad for your health. And in early 2012, One Million Moms campaigned to get JC Penney to drop Ellen DeGeneres as their spokeswoman due to her terrifying gayness.
A publicist for Lucifer did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment regarding AFA’s dumb new petition. But Neil Gaiman had a response to share on his Tumblr.
“Ah,” he wrote. “It seems like only yesterday (but it was 1991) that the ‘Concerned Mothers of America’ announced that they were boycotting SANDMAN because it contained Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans characters. It was Wanda that upset them most: the idea of a Trans Woman in a comic book… They told us they were organising a boycott of SANDMAN, which they would only stop if we wrote to the American Family Association and promised to reform.”
He concludes: “I wonder if they noticed it didn’t work last time, either…”
