Alabama Republican Thinks There's Entirely Too Much Gay Sex and 'Wife Swapping' on TV

When disgraced former State Supreme Court justice Roy Moore announced he was tossing his oversized cowboy hat into Alabama’s upcoming Senate race, I assumed—reasonably, given his long, long history of doing insane things—that any subsequent election bullshit in the Yellowhammer state would largely be focused on him. I was wrong.

Folks, meet Republican Senate candidate and current Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill—a man with deep concerns about the moral rot eating away at America’s spiritual core.

“There are no more good TV shows on like ‘Gunsmoke,’ ‘Bonanza,’ ‘The Virginian,’ ‘Andy Griffith,’ ‘I Love Lucy,’” Merrill said at a recent campaign stop, according to Yellowhammer news. “We don’t have those shows anymore.

“We’re too interested in homosexual activities,” Merrill continued. “We’re too interested in seeing how this family’s finding a way to mess on this family or to see how people are trying to date on TV, or having wife-swapping on TV.”

He confirmed his television criticism to AL.com on Monday evening, saying:

I meant what I said. People are too interested in anything that is not uplifting, edifying. They’re too busy being preoccupied with homosexual activities and the wife swap shows.

He also lamented that there are no longer “shows that promote family and culture with a father, a mother and children based on biblical teachings and biblical principles on which our nation was founded.”

There is plenty of lousy TV out there. (Although there hasn’t been a new episode of Wife Swap since 2013). That said, perhaps he should check out HBO’s Little Big Lies, which my Splinter coworkers insist is great, and absolutely will not shut up about.

As for his assertion about “homosexual activities”—well, no amount of quality television programming is gonna change his good ol’ fashioned homophobia, I’m afraid.