NBC's The Blacklist let fly with a full anti-religion broadside on Thursday night. Except, true to liberal form they declined to call out the specific religion in question by name, which should tell you all you need to know about which religion they were talking about.
In an episode titled “The Djinn,” Raymond Reddington (James Spader) helps FBI agent Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone) track down a Blacklister known as “The Djinn,” who is helping people with revenge fantasies fulfill their evil desires and exact their revenge on the people who hurt them and their families.
Except “The Djinn” has a little revenge plot of her own cooked-up as she captures and tortures her father for a crime that, shall we say does not fall under the category of normal father-daughter relations:
**WARNING: EXPLICIT LANGUAGE**
Nasim: What do you want?
Reddington: To offer my sympathies.
Nasim: I know who you are.
Reddington: And I know who you are, Nasim. What a beautiful name. It means "Breeze" in Farsi. But you weren't born Nasim. You were born Nasir -- "The victorious." How ironic. But a boy. A perfectly healthy boy.
Nasim: I don't know what you're talking about.
Elizabeth: Alice told us the story. We know you're the djinn.
Reddington: And this must be your father. The butcher. Tell me, Bahram, was it so horrific to discover that your 19-year-old son, your eldest son, was gay? So horrific that you forced him against his will to go under the knife, change his gender, to give you a daughter instead of your son, who is gay?
Bahram: Clerics accept... People can get trapped in the body of the wrong sex. The law says –
Nasim: I wasn't trapped. I liked my body. I liked men.
Bahram: I wanted to protect you, Nasim. They could have killed you.
Reddington: For being gay. They're so homophobic that being gay is a hideous crime, but chopping off a man's penis isn't? Honestly, is it just me, or is the human race, armed with religion, poisoned by prejudice, and absolutely frantic with hatred and fear, galloping pell-mell back to the dark ages? Who on Earth is hurt by a little girl going to school or a child being gay? Let's be frank, Bahram. You didn't change your son to protect him. You changed him because he disgusted you.
Bahram: That's not true.
Nasim: You violated my body without consent. You sliced out my identity and discarded it as waste. You cursed me to live the rest of my life as a second-class citizen, despite being a firstborn son.
Yeah! Castration bad, sexual reassignment…yuck! Terrible! Get rid of it!
Here’s the problem though. Anyone happen to notice that in all that ranting about the backward “galloping” of religion, Reddington declined to mention the particular major world religion that is predominant in most countries where gays are most in danger?
Earlier in the episode, it comes out that the family in question here is from Iran. Iran is widely considered by many to be the world’s greatest offender to gay rights. And yes, they’re Muslim. As is Afghanistan, Turkey, and several other of the countries that are known for being openly hostile to gays. With state-sanctioned penalties for homosexuality, up to and including imprisonment, torture, and execution.
Yet, instead of naming the particular faith, and making his rant against barbaric behavior towards gays actually mean something by calling out the people who are doing it, instead Reddington makes some wide-reaching, generalized assault against all religion. As if there’s anything even approaching a minority of Christians and Jews in America --or anywhere else for that matter-- that would condone state-sanctioned gender reassignment.
The lamest part of the whole thing being that Reddington’s character is supposed to be this guy that “keeps it real,” and is always brutally honest. Except when it comes to Islam, his guts appear to have been “reassigned.”
