Star Trek Boldly Goes to Racism, Homophobia, Sexism, and Rape
A Change.org petition has been launched urging CBS and StarTrek.com to clean up their act and moderate their official Facebook page for Star Trek. With close to 3.4 million the page is rife with racist, homophobic, and sexist comments, and those who speak out against them are often bullied with harassment, and even threatened by trolls.
The petition calls upon CBS and StarTrek.com to work together to implement a comments policy that:
- Clearly bans hate speech, rape jokes, and referring to women as a group by derogatory terms (e.g. “sluts”). As well, the policy should ban comments referring to groups of people by racial, homophobic, transphobic, or ableist slurs;
- Disallows personal attacks against other commenters; and
- Bans aggressive negative commenting on the personal appearance of other commenters and the posts’ subjects.
If you want to see the examples that have been collected of the comments, you can do so at this site and here. There is a trigger warning though, so be careful.
What’s truly sad is that Star Trek was about inclusion (one just needs to look at its diverse cast as evidence), and broke ground in the civil rights movement (Kirk and Uhuru’s kiss is one example). The show itself portrayed a better world of peace and acceptance. Numerous episodes have been commentary on civil and social rights, championing them. The universe was and is a truly forward looking progressive one.
Looking at these comments though, creator Gene Roddenberry would be disappointed and ashamed.
