I was okay when Roseanne was forced off of her show over racist tweets; I’m not super into the idea that everyone is basically forced to have an online presence and then punished when they say something dumb, but a television actor saying something as racist as what Roseanne Barr said is probably going to get fired no matter what medium they do it on. Just look at how much of a hit Mel Gibson’s career took.
I’ve even come to terms with James Gunn getting fired, even though it means that the actors involved in Guardians of the Galaxy won’t be likely to return to the Marvel Universe once their contracts are up and the third Guardians film will likely be sub-par and cost the studio hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. Disney executives are far more likely to be okay with losing a few billion dollars here or there than they are with publicly admitting they made a mistake.
But this time these bastards have finally gone too far. You know what I’m talking about already, I’m sure, the forced resignation of the Maine Lobster Festival Sea Goddess after pictures surfaced of her smoking from a vape pen and even (gasp) smoking a marijuana! I know what she did was unforgivable, a teenager doing drugs, especially one as harmful as “weed,” a drug which our Attorney General will be happy to tell you is 30 times more deadly than heroin, but you do not mess with the Maine Lobster Festival Sea Goddess.
I just don’t know how to process this information. Disgraced former Sea Goddess Taylor Hamlin addressed the controversy on her Facebook, saying, in part:
I just wanted to let everyone know that the lobster festival committee has taken me down from the sea goddess position due to members of our community emailing pictures of me through out high school. Everybody is a teen once in awhile . I’m sorry to whoever didn’t receive the goddess they wanted and felt the need to sabotage this amazing thing that has happened to me. You clearly don’t know me well enough or know the real Taylor Hamlin. I am active through out our community, in sports, church, and school.
While I do find the fact that she once smoked a pot to be unforgivable and I think she should spend the rest of her life self-flagellating for it, but the office of Sea Goddess is bigger than that. What the Maine Lobster Festival has done is just given us an angry Sea Goddess. Do you have any idea what that could mean, especially with global warming? The seas are angry, Maine Lobster Festival, and they will have vengeance for their goddess! The Sea Goddess also has telepathic control over lobsters, who I can only assume are being commanded to escape their cages and rain terror on the populace like they did in Annie Hall.
Okay, I’m now being told that I’ve confused the Maine Lobster Festival Sea Goddess with Aquaman. I’ve been further informed that there is no proven link between either marijuana use or vaping and any negative health effects at all, and that no one has ever died from any illness caused by either of them in the entire history of the world because they’re entirely harmless. We at The Blemish regret the error.
What we actually have is just another sign of the times that we live in. We’re all expected to consider it completely normal for people to pore over everything we’ve ever done online or in our private lives and be perpetually punished for them. And this was really, literally nothing. It’s one thing to say “Okay, maybe we pull the reruns of The Cosby Show after Bill Cosby is accused of rape by over 50 women.” It’s a whole other to say a teenager smoking pot makes them unqualified to do literally anything. If we exclude everyone who smoked pot as a teenager from activities, the only people left are going to be those weird incels who worship Kermit the Frog impersonator Jordan B. Peterson, and that’s not a world anyone wants to live in.