Ray Comfort is disturbed by gay rights, and by the movement toward a society where someone’s sexuality isn’t a legitimate excuse to discriminate against them. This isn’t new information, of course. However, what is new is that Comfort has released a trailer for a movie centering around gay rights. It’s called Audacity , and, more specifically, it centers on Christian views of gay rights — and whether it’s okay not to speak those views.
Audacity follows on a young Christian man who has “convictions” about what Ray Comfort terms “the gay lifestyle” — but he’s afraid to speak out. He has a co-worker who is pressing him, pointing out Biblical passages and pushing him to justify his views. The drama cranks up when he faces a literal life-or-death situation that is presumably orchestrated to demonstrate Ray Comfort’s unbelievable thesis: that ‘hating’ LGBT people and fighting against gay rights aren’t the same thing.
(The Westboro Baptist Church calls what they do a “ministry of love” too.)
The movie is very much in the same vein as other recent religious films, such as God’s Not Dead — it depicts a Christian fighting to spread God’s word and keep his faith in a world that is fighting to take it from him. Unlike God’s Not Dead , though, this movie doesn’t feature Kevin Sorbo or any other names to equal his. The other key difference is that, while God’s Not Dead was quite generally about Christianity and the right to one’s beliefs, Ray Comfort’s movie is centered on one aspect of some sects of Christianity: the anti-gay rhetoric.
Check out the trailer below.
The themes present in the trailer include: a Christian being bullied by gay rights proponents, a Christian afraid to speak out, and a Christian showing love through the ultimate sacrifice.
The trailer and synopsis don’t lay out the character’s beliefs about gay rights in detail. However, there are two things he’s asked to affirm: that he thinks gay people should be stoned (not the kind that’s legal in Colorado) and that he believes gay people are going to Hell. He denies both.
To be quite clear here, in the trailer that is about this young man failing to speak his convictions, he explicitly denies that he thinks gay people should be stoned, and refuses to say that he thinks they are going to Hell — it’s easy to make an educated guess what his “convictions” are.
Comfort describes the response he expects from the movie:
Audacity uses a unique approach to address a very sensitive subject in contemporary society. Regardless of your views on the gay lifestyle, you’ll gain fresh insights and a new perspective.
If there was any doubt about the stance the movie will express on LGBT rights, that phrase “the gay lifestyle” settles it.
You may wonder if Ray Comfort learned anything from his cohort Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas disaster last year . Well, it looks as though he may have — or he just may have struggled to find a theater that would air a blatantly anti-gay film that doesn’t even have the saving grace of a few well-known actors.
Either way, Comfort’s movie won’t open to empty theaters. He’s releasing it online, instead.
Audacity will release through Living Waters on June 24th — costing $19.99 (more than the cost of two months of Netflix.)
Eight weeks after the paid release, Comfort explains that Audacity will move to Youtube. Comfort also promises bonus material with purchase, including Ray Comfort’s own ebook detailing his belief that Mark Twain hated God, and an ebook of Audacity .
[Image via: Audacity Screengrab ]