Thomas Hiura questions Rick Dancer support for LGBTQ+

A Human Rights commissioner who identifies as nonbinary calls out Rick Dancer, and the media celebrity responds on his website. At the June 20 meeting:

[00:00:10] Thomas Hiura (Eugene Human Rights Commission): …Anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment I think is just so troublingly present during this Pride Month. And you know, North Eugene High School was brought up, that’s my alma mater, Class of 2012, love it there.

[00:00:25] But it’s just funny to think and this is a little bit of a—I’ll try to keep it short, but you know, when I was a student there, we would do rallies for MLK Day and various really exciting things. And just one of the things that was, to talk about the enticing nature of this bigotry or near-bigotry that’s been promulgating everywhere:

[00:00:43] There’s a person who was a speaker at a civil rights rally. His name was former newscaster Rick Dancer. He was actually brought in as, like, the speaker, the keynote speaker, for our event on, like, social justice, and that was like 2011. And now, things have just changed a lot, it seems.

[00:01:02] And I mean, if you’re familiar with what that gentleman has been focused on lately, it’s very much not in the vein of, in my opinion, justice for the marginalized. He seems to be stirring up a lot of the problems that we’re talking about. Earlier last night he posted something and he ended up deleting it.

[00:01:19] But I wanted to set the record straight just a little bit about this narrative I’ve been seeing about a Pixar film called Elemental. And so I guess national conservative commentator Ben Shapiro had posted, ‘Pixar’s Elemental with nonbinary character flops at box office.’

[00:01:37] He implied this movie flopped because it had a nonbinary character. And he failed to mention that it was an extremely small role. It was a character who appeared once with no lines.

[00:01:48] So just this real, real disparate nature between the truth of whatever it is that’s leading that movie to not be as successful as many Pixar movies, some of which have not been very successful, but most of which are, and this idea that it’s because of some character being non-binary.

[00:02:05] And Rick Dancer had shared that. You know, I think he lives in Montana now, but he continues to have a big voice in our community, among people who consider themselves, like, open-minded, middle-of-the-road, common-sense, these kinds of terms.

[00:02:16] And his comment—I can’t see it now ‘cause he deleted it—but he basically said something like, ‘People are waking up to the BS (or something) of acceptance of nonbinary people in film or children’s media’ or whatever it may be, you know? Ooh. Scary. Right.

[00:02:31] As a person who identifies under that identity myself, I just think that deserved to be called out and I’m glad he deleted it. He’s probably not going to account for it in any way other than that. And just, I don’t know.

[00:02:42] Keep your eyes on the prize and be aware of the enticing nature of these philosophies about our neighbors.

[00:02:51] John Q: Rick Dancer responded to those comments on RickDancer.com. He said, “I don’t like what Disney is doing and I’m glad people are standing up. But this isn’t my battle.”

[00:03:01] Rick said his MLK speech encouraged students to look past color and work together, and says we can disagree without being against one another.

[00:03:09] He concluded: “I guess if someone really wanted to educate or find common ground with me they might have tried connecting rather than publicly flogging me at a Human Rights meeting.”

[00:03:19] In a short video on his website, he recounted the Bible story of Jonah.

[00:03:25] Rick Dancer: So the moral of that story to me is if I’m called to do what I’m doing, then if I don’t do it, it’s worse than if I do do it because I certainly don’t want to get thrown out of the boat. I don’t care if you throw me out of the culture, but you’re not going to throw me out of the boat.

[00:03:45] John Q: You can read Rick’s complete response at his website, or at ours.