Reporting on Bob Iger’s return to the helm of the scandal-wracked Disney, Caroline Downey writes:
While Chapek was still presiding over Disney, the company publicly opposed Florida’s Parental Rights in Education legislation, dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics, which prohibited the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to young elementary-school students. Some employees marched out of the California headquarters and protested the law. The company’s C-suite faced intense pressure from staff members and investors to condemn the DeSantis administration, which approved the law. Disney published a statement in March demanding that the law be repealed.
In March, an executive producer at Disney said she was advancing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to insert queerness into children’s animated TV series. Latoya Raveneau said she was pleasantly surprised upon her hiring that Disney was accommodating to her pitches for LGBT content for younger audiences.
Sounds a whole lot like getting involved in the political process, doesn’t it? Not so fast. At a recent Disney employee town hall,
Iger suggested that the outrage among consumers over Disney’s left-leaning trajectory is unwarranted. What some people deem “political,” he suggested, is merely about the good of humanity.
“There’s a misperception about what politics is. I think that some of the subjects that have proven to be ‘controversial’ as it relates to Disney have been branded ‘political,’ and I don’t necessarily believe they are,” Iger said. “I don’t think when you are telling stories and attempting to be a good citizen of the world that that’s political. Just not how I view it.”
One of the favorite progressive dogmas of our time, dating back to the 1960s student movements and second-wave feminism, is that “the personal is political.” The catchphrase has been echoed time and time again in recent years to justify the politicization of many previously apolitical spheres of American life. But now that Americans are getting upset about politicizing things like children’s cartoons, we’re being informed that it isn’t political at all. “We’re just telling stories,” Iger insists. If only that were still true.
The personal is political. But don’t take the politics too personally.