Don’t get it confused – we’re not talking about that Mel Gibson movie, The Passion of the Christ. Over 2 million people have signed a petition in the last few weeks asking Netflix to take down “The First Temptation of Christ,” a comedy special that has been available to stream this month on the platform.
The problem they have? Well, Jesus is depicted as homosexual.
You can understand the Christian outrage, naturally.
This is a 46-minute special that was created by Porta dos Fundos, a comedy troupe that mainly posts their work on YouTube and is based out of Brazil.
According to the Netflix description, Jesus is hitting 30 and bringing a guest to meet his family. The guest? His partner, Orlando. Jesus’s friend and family do not expect him to bring home a man, however, and chaos ensues.
The special is completely in Spanish, but Netflix has done a good job with its subtitles so anyone can really appreciate the humor. This sounds like a raunchy, questionable flick, but it is actually quite funny and provides a lot of questions.
Christians, however, are very mad.
A petition on Change.org to have Netflix remove “The First Temptation of Christ” and apologize for streaming it has over 2 million signatures and counting from all over the world.
Another, separate petition from CitizenGo, a conservative group, has over 500,000 signatures.
In short, a lot of people on the internet are very mad. Cofounder of the group, Fabio Porchat, has spoken out about the controversy, saying that the only reason it’s getting so much attention is that people are homophobic.
“For some Catholics here in Brazil, it’s okay if Jesus is a bad guy, uses drugs, that’s no problem. The problem is he’s gay. No, he can’t be gay. And that’s interesting because Jesus is everything. God is black and white and gay and straight. God is everything. It’s more homophobic to be insulted by a gay Jesus than to make Jesus special.”
Despite the petitions, Netflix seems to have no interest in removing “The First Temptation of Christ.” Netflix is in a good position because they don’t really have to bend to make anyone happy… they do what they want, in a very real sense.
Their only statement on this is that Netflix “values artistic freedom and humor through satire on the most diverse cultural themes of our society and believes that freedom of expression is an essential construction for a democratic country.”
Netflix has previously refused to remove controversial movies or television shows from their platform, including “Super Drags” and “Desire,” which received similar backlash.
