JoJo Siwa is responding to controversy around new network Great American Family, backed by Candace Cameron Bure, who says movies on the channel will focus on traditional families, with a mom and a dad.
The 19-year-old YouTube star expressed outrage on Instagram Tuesday, saying it’s “rude and hurtful to a whole community of people.”Â
“I can’t believe after everything that went down just a few months ago, that she would not only create a movie with intention of excluding LGBTQIA+, but then also talk about it in the press,” Siwa wrote, captioning a screengrab of an article from EDGE Media Network titled “Candace Cameron Bure’s Plans for New Cable Channel: No Gays.”Â
Siwa, who came out as a member of the LGBTQ community in 2021, was supported in the comments by her fellow “Dance Moms” alum Maddie Ziegler and Bure’s “Full House” co-star Jodie Sweetin.
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What did Candace Cameron Bure say?
The EDGE story references an interview The Wall Street Journal conducted with Bure, published Monday, in which she doubled-down on her position that “Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core.”
Bure, 46, told USA TODAY in October during a discussion about inclusivity on the channel that Great American Family would “have people of all ethnicities,” but is “going to focus on traditional families.”Â
“We certainly don’t want to be exactly like any other network, and I know that Great American Family will focus on tradition,” she said.
She also said the network will “lean into the faith element,” adding that means “more storytelling about the Christian faith and talking about God. And not just making God a general statement of belief, but actually talking about Jesus and more specifics of the Christian faith.”
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What is Candace Cameron Bure’s role with the network?
Bure was offered an opportunity to shape Great American Family, a network co-founded by Bill Abbott, the former president and CEO of Hallmark Channel’s parent company, who developed that network’s popular Countdown to Christmas.
“More than just being an actress on the channel or even producing movies, it’s being … an executive there to help build and grow the network,” she said last month. Bure and Abbott hadn’t settled on a formal role, but she described her duties as “curating content for the whole channel. I’m part of programming and development.”
When facing similar questions about representation, Abbott said “we always want to be inclusive, and it’s certainly it’s always an area of focus.” This year’s slate of holiday movies does not include any storylines involving same-sex couples.Â
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What happened with Candace Cameron Bure and JoJo Siwa previously?
Tuesday isn’t the first time Siwa has called out Bure. In July, the actress-singer identified Bure as the “rudest celebrity” she’d ever met for not taking a picture with her at a “Fuller House” premiere when she was 11. Siwa told Page Six of the incident: “It was at the afterparty that she didn’t want to take a picture with me, and I was OK with that. But then I turned around, and when I looked back, she was taking pictures with other kids, and that’s what made me really, really upset.”
Bure said she was completely blindsided by Siwa’s comments in a video shared to Instagram and said that she immediately reached out to Siwa through a mutual friend, her publicist and a direct message. Bure apologized to Siwa and said the two had a “great conversation.”Â
Bure added that the two went on to share their “joy for one another in that we are both positive, encouraging people.”
“I told JoJo how much I’ve always appreciated her because she has been a good role model because of her positivity throughout her whole life and career, and she said she still loves watching ‘Full House’ and watches it to fall asleep,” Bure said. “So we had all the feels and it was all good, and there’s no drama.”
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Who else is speaking out against Bure?
“One Tree Hill” actress Hilarie Burton, who starred in several Hallmark movies, called Bure and Abbott “disgusting” in a tweet Monday.
“Now they’re just openly admitting their bigotry,” she wrote. “I called this (expletive) out years ago when Abbott was at Hallmark. Glad they dumped him. Being LGBTQ isn’t a ‘trend’. That guy and his network are disgusting. You too, Candy. There is nothing untraditional about same-sex couples.”
Burton alleged in a series of December 2019 tweets that the channel resisted her efforts to make a project more inclusive by adding an “LGBTQ character, an interracial couple and diverse casting” to a script. Burton says she exited the project after the network told her to “take it or leave it.” “The bigotry comes from the top and permeates the whole deal (at Hallmark),” Burton tweeted. The network declined to comment on Burton’s tweets at the time.
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Contributing: Edward Segarra and Amy Haneline
Story Credit: usatoday.com