Why Is This Anti-Gay Marriage Pamphlet Using Paul Walker's Death as a Metaphor?

If someone asked me to name something late actor Paul Walker (God rest his soul) and marriage equality had in common, I'd be practically forced to say "not existing." Earth has no Paul Walker, and Australia has no marriage equality. That's about it.

Well I'd be wrong. Unequivocally. In the eyes of a pamphlet.

Or, more accurately, in the eyes of a super religious pamphlet creator and distributor who almost certainly live in a one horse town (two horse, tops!) somewhere in Utah and eats kiwi fruit like an apple, skins and everything (gross).

According to a tweet by Big Jez posted last week, anti-gay marriage pamphlets were being distributed around Australia care of the Australian branch of a US Evangelist group called, very bizarrely, Amazing Facts. The pamphlets, fucked as they already are in intention and being, are even more fucked once it is revealed that their first three pages detail the similarity between marriage equality and the death of Paul Walker. Yeah.

Oh, huh? "How are those two things in any way related?" Very good and great and interesting question. I'm not sure. Shall we look into it?

According to their website, Amazing Facts started as a kind of bible study radio show in the US that linked interesting information tidbits to bible verses and Christian values. It then became TV shows and books and magazines and, evidently, this woeful little pamphlet about Australia's marriage equality debate, and its miserable fucking attempt at a metaphor.

The pamphlet starts out recounting the night that Paul Walker died which is very cool and not at all messed up:

On November 30, 2013, Paul Walker, of Fast & Furious movie franchise fame, died when the car in which he was a passenger lost control on a city street, spin across lanes of traffic, rammed into a light pole, and burst into flames. First things first: this sentence is miles long. Stop. Commas are not pauses. You have lost me. I will now never respect you.

Having set the scene, the pamphlet moves onto questions of the Onus of Blame:

Do you believe that Walker and the driver are to blame for using the vehicle in a way and in a place not intended by the car maker? After all, Porsche intended their vehicle to be driven at high speed only under specialised conditions. Can the company be blamed if someone ignores their advice?

This sneaky little pamphlet seems to ever-so-gently and eloquently suggest that no person with rational thought processes would suggest Porsche were responsible for the crash, because any old thing in the hands of anyone has the power to be dangerous and immoral. I think. I think I think I think.

As far as I can tell, what Amazing Facts (worst name, get a better name) is trying to communicate is this: Porsche is innocent, cars in general are cool but are also sometimes fucked and capable of terrifying things, and thinking otherwise—thinkings cars are responsible for crashes and not the people driving them—is basically like saying that the Big Man Upstairs (G.O.D.) is responsible for gayness. Which he's totally not, by the way.

It's basically impossible to not read the pamphlet in the voice of a 14-year-old boy. Who forgot that his Ethics 101 debate was today. He wrote his closing argument while speaker number four was talking, in very almost illegible scribble on the back of an assignment from another class. Now he's standing in front of the whole class, bullets of sweat gathering underneath his bottom lip, terrified he'll get an erection (he gets them sometimes when he's cripplingly nervous) and Kate Wesley will see and then she'll never fuck him because he's an idiot who has no idea what on Earth he's talking about or saying and he should have just stayed home today why is he such a loser!!! "And that is why gay marriage is, um, bad. Thank you."

A quick question for Amazing Facts: have you ever considered that anyone fucking stupid enough to read a pamphlet (that couldn't manage to find a more recent and relevant link than the 2013 untimely death of an actor) and then have it literally change their sociopolitical beliefs probably doesn't give a single fuck about anything at all? Like they literally never even intended to vote in the first place? They are the person who, while everyone else was reading and writing and talking about marriage equality, was phoning channel 7 over and over, demanding to know when the next season of Mrs. Brown's Boys will air and if, as a huge fan of the show and supporter of the station, they can have free tickets to the live 2018 arena tour.

That's the person you're writing for. A person who kisses inanimate objects and says goodnight to them—"goodnight TV, goodnight couch". A person who writes angry letters to supermarkets because there weren't enough baskets to go around like one night six weeks ago.

I don't know what I'm talking about anymore to be quite honest with you because some time ago I slipped into a white hot rage about anyone anywhere ever using whatever excuse possible—such as a half-baked, pseudo-millennial reference—to force their insipid and tenuous belief system on an entire world of people. It's… I… You're evil people. More evil than people who wash dishes by rinsing them under the tap. More evil than changing the song halfway through. More evil than more than one shop assistant asking "How's it going!". That evil. RIP Paul Walker by the way, Fast and the Furious is an incredible franchise and Tokyo Drift is one of the best car movies ever I fucking hate you.

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