A Republican Alabama official seeking to unseat Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) in the 2020 election complained that “homosexual activities” have supplanted “good TV shows” of the 1950s and 1960s.
“There are no more good TV shows on like ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Virginian,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘I Love Lucy.’ We don’t have those shows anymore. We’re too interested in homosexual activities,” Senate candidate John Merrill, Alabama’s current secretary of state, said at a Saturday campaign event.
Instead, Merrill said, Americans are “too interested” in seeing “how people are trying to date on TV” and “having wife-swapping on TV.”
Local news site Yellowhammer first reported the comments, which Merrill later confirmed to AL.com.
“The foundational principles which we have grown up as a nation are no more,” Merrill told AL.com. He repeated his view that people are too willing to watch “the wife swap TV shows and the shows that are not morally uplifting” and not based on “biblical foundations.”
“That’s the problem,” Merrill said. He declined to elaborate on what he meant by “homosexual activities,” AL.com reported. Merrill is one of several GOP candidates seeking the party’s nomination in the race against Jones, who won a 2017 special election against Republican candidate Roy Moore. Moore narrowly lost in the deep red state after he was accused by several women of sexually harassing or assaulting them when they were young women and he was in his 30s.
Despite Jones’ historic victory ― he’s the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the Senate since 1992 ― there remain questions about whether he can win a full term against a less controversial GOP opponent.
Moore, however, is running again.
