Careful about dropping that G-bomb! As 10-year-old Lily and her mother Julie found out, “God” is considered a profanity on the Disney website.
Appearing on the Dec. 2 “Fox & Friends,” the mother and daughter explained that DisneyChannel.com has weekly quizzes for kids to answer. Appropriately, last week’s question asked kids, “What’s your favorite thing about the holidays?” Lily responded with the things she was most thankful for. Her mother Julie told host Elisabeth Hasselbeck that, “She typed in that she was thankful for God and her family and church and her friends.”
When Lily hit submit the post was blocked. A message in red letters appeared beneath her answer, saying “Please Be Nice!” Lily called her mother over and the two changed words around attempting to figure out what Disney was taking offense at. It was only when they removed “God” from the post that Lily’s response was accepted. This made no sense to Lily, who told Hasselbeck, “God is the reason we have all the stuff that we have.”
Julie said she contacted Fox News reporter Todd Starnes hoping that he “could get some sort of answer ‘cause I just don’t want children to feel like there is something wrong or something that they should be ashamed of in sharing their faith with their peers.” Starnes wrote up their story and reached out to Disney for a response.
Disney replied to Fox’s request for an explanation, claiming that Lily’s post was originally blocked “Because so many people attempt to abuse the system and use the word “God” in conjunction with profanity, in abundance of caution, our system is forced to catch and prevent any use of the word on our web site.”
Julie said it was mostly understandable they’d want to prevent expletives on the website, “But a big red message that tells a child that it's not nice to be thankful for God might not be the best way to handle that.”
Sounds like Disney is taking the easy way out considering the majority of DisneyChannel.Com visitors are younger kids who log on to play games, answer quizzes or watch clips of their favorite shows – probably not much given to using profanity. It’s not surprising, really, given Disney’s track record of bowing to liberal pressure from groups such as the LGBTQ community [1] and promising to increase gay and lesbian characters in its shows, or the astonishing rate at which it churns out child stars such as Nick Jonas [2] and Miley Cyrus [3] turning them into “pop-tarts.” [4]