Kirk Cameron used to be really effing cool and I lusted after him for a bit when he starred as Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. My crush didn’t last long, however, as I was really a Boner girl. What can I say? I’ve always loved the geeks. But what in Hades happened to Kirk? He went all weird and rigidly Christian and all of a sudden the show kind of sucked in that it didn’t address real teen/family issues anymore.
But let’s begin with history before we get to the crazy. Kirk Cameron began acting at age nine, his first job an advertisement for a breakfast cereal. He nabbed his first starring role at age 10, in the television series Two Marriages. At this age, he appeared in several television shows and films. He became famous in 1985 after being cast as Michael Seaver in the ABC television sitcom Growing Pains. Cameron subsequently became a teen heartthrob in the late 1980s, while appearing on the covers of several teen magazines, including Tiger Beat, Teen Beat, 16 and others. At the time, he was pulling in $50 large.
In the series, Mike Seaver is a girl crazy teenage boy with a raging boner and many girlfriends. His two best friends, Richard Milhous “Boner” Stabone (played by Josh Andrew Koenig, who committed suicide January 2010 at the age of 41) and Eddie (KC Martel) always at his side, got into the usual teenage shenanigans and Mike always got the girl. Seaver’s last girlfriend was Kate MacDonald, who was played by Chelsea Noble, Cameron’s future wife. Kirk was in a few movies after the show ended.
During the most of the show, though, Kirk Cameron was an atheist, but around age 17 or 18, during the height of his career on Growing Pains, he developed a belief in God, and became a Christian. After converting to Christianity, he began to insist that story lines be stripped of anything he thought too “adult” or “racy” in Growing Pains. Aaaand that’s when it began to suck really hard.
Kirk has since devoted himself to Christ and started founding ministries and “teaching” Christian evangelism to people, engaging in debates with folks about the supposed scientific proof of intelligent design and making bad movies (the Left Behind series). He and his partner saw fit to disseminate to thousands of college students across the country an altered Chuck Darwin’s On the Origin of Species book for purposes of furthering their creationist assertions about Darwin and evolution. Of course it wasn’t just altered in that they added their own notes and refutations to the book, but they also removed selected parts of Darwin’s original text. The “new” book was criticized by scientists and Darwin biographers for containing misinformation about Darwin and repeating long-discredited creationist arguments, for
employing logical fallacies, and for omitting key chapters of the book. Cameron’s camp later said that the four chapters were chosen at random to be omitted in order to make the book small enough to be affordable as a giveaway (suuuuuuuuuure), with the absent chapters available for download (but the fine print of this was strangely absent). The National Center for Science Education arranged a campaign at colleges across the U.S. to distribute an analysis of the Comfort introduction and a banana bookmark, in reference to Comfort’s argument that the structure of the banana is evidence for Intelligent Design, or God.
Does this make Kirk Cameron bad? I don’t know. He’s not Lindsay Lohan bad, but he certainly turned to the other end of the continuum, which, as the evangelical Westboro Baptist Church shows repeatedly, evangelists are not the most tolerant people in the world, especially of those who don’t fit their specifications for randomly bad interpretations of biblical selections that promote hate and intolerance. On the surface Cameron seems earnest and he and his wife founded Camp Firefly, a summer camp that gives terminally ill children and their families a free week’s vacation.
But Kirk, who is now 37 and an adult capable of rational thought, forced movie executives to cast his wife of 17 years, Chelsea, as a kissing stand-in for his new film Fireproof, because he refused to kiss his onscreen wife. Apparently, he promised Chelsea he would never kiss another woman and that includes when he’s doing his job.
“Because I have a commitment not to kiss any other woman,” Kirk says, “my wife Chelsea came in to the set and wore the dress my character’s wife wore. We shot the scene in silhouette, so when I kiss my wife, I’m actually kissing my wife and honoring our marriage.”
It’s shit like that that’s crazy. It’s honorable and nice in a small way, but it’s just sort of nutty. And that layered on his odd, inconsistent views on the real world and religion make me give him the side-eye. I don’t trust the evangelical fundies. Ah, Mike Seaver. The non-crazy version of you will remain in my memories.
I wish Kirk wouldn’t have “left behind” Mike Seaver. (SAD PUN) Even if he did dress like Ronald McDonald. But I miss him and I miss my Boner.
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