Sparks flew last week on the Fantasy Suites episode of “The Bachelorette,” the popular but sleazy reality dating show, between star Hannah Brown and Luke Parker, who had been considered the frontrunner for much of the season.
The Fantasy Suites Week of the dating competition offers the lead the opportunity to enter into an overnight date without cameras with as many of the final four contestants as she or he wishes. Brown invited three of her contestants into the overnight suite and was clear with both the contestants and viewers about her intentions to explore her sexuality. Parker’s turn came fourth and, before she had the opportunity to think about presenting him with the date card, the conversation turned confrontational, and he was sent packing.
The argument even spilled over into Twitter and Instagram.
It was the sex talk that got the bachelor sent home. The born-again Christian drew ire earlier in the season when he told her he was saving sex for marriage and wanted her to do the same.
“Let’s talk about sex and how the marriage bed should be kept pure,” the 24-year-old, who traded his player ways to follow Christ, told Hannah on the Fantasy Suites episode.
Parker’s concern was that Brown would use the Fantasy Suites episode to have sex with one or more of the contestants. And as a Christian — and one who cared for her — he felt compelled to politely ask her if she’d please not fall into that trap and instead choose to honor their relationship.
“Let’s say you have had sex with one or multiple of these guys, I would be wanting to go home,” Luke P admitted.
For reasons that remain unclear, this offended Brown and her far-left feminist fans. To them, the notion of someone they’re in a relationship with asking them to not share their body with the rest of the world is somehow misogynist and sexist.
Brown, also a professing Christian, immediately took offense to Luke P’s comments and accused him of “slut-shaming” her.
“Why do you have the right to do that? Because, you’re not my husband,” Brown told Parker.
“The closest thing to love at first sight was probably with you,” Brown admitted during Parker’s final episode, and he thought the two were on the same page when it came to faith and family. But the 24-year-old, called “Luke P” on the show, quickly found out he had broken her heart with each episode leading up to the dramatic moment that left Brown flipping him off.
“Guess what? Sex might be a sin out of marriage, pride is a sin, too, and I feel like this is like a pride thing,” Brown said. “I feel like I’ve finally gotten clarity on you and I do not want you to be my husband.”
When Parker asked if he could have a minute, Brown told him she had sex in a windmill Fantasy Suite on the show with contestant Peter Weber, not once, but twice: “I have had sex and, like, Jesus still loves me.”
The Alabama native asked if he could pray for the Bachelorette star before he left. But she refused.
Brown told Entertainment Tonight it was her “powerplay moment” of the season.
But the feud didn’t end there. The two got in a Twitter war over sin and a Christian response to it.
“The difference in how we view sin is seen in the response,” Parker wrote. “I’m weeping at mine and you’re laughing at yours. All sin stings. My heart hurts for both of us.”
But Brown clapped back: “time and time again Jesus loved and ate with ‘sinners’ who laughed. And time and time again he rebuked ‘saints’ that judged. Where do you fall Luke?”
He shot back: “There is a difference between eating with sinners who laugh and sinners who laugh at their sin. Sin is the very thing that put Jesus on the cross and that’s not a laughing matter.”
The bigger picture
Thanks to Brown’s willingness to throw a tantrum over Parker’s request and then brag on national TV about her sexual exploits, she’s become a folk hero to many Bachelorette fans and especially the feminist far-left.
Parker meanwhile has become the butt of every anti-Christian left-winger.
Brown even characterized Parker’s stance on pre-marital sex as being reflective of some form of toxic masculinity. “I don’t owe you anything … and, guess what? A man does not control anything I do,” she told Parker in the episode.
When speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the taping for the Bachelorette: Men Tell All reunion special (which aired July 22), Brown opened up about taking a stand against Parker, being a sex-positive lead for the franchise and the consequences that have come with her on-air honesty about intimacy.
“It wasn’t a calculated thing at all,” she tells THR about her and Parker’s Fantasy Suite Week confrontation. “It was just me speaking my truth about how I felt in the moment and how he made me feel, and learning from past relationships and bringing that into the relationship with Luke and kind of taking off my blinders in that moment.”
On the reunion special, Brown even apologized to Bachelorette viewers for having subjected them to so much airtime of Luke, and again expressed her “female empowerment.”
A little history of this season’s “Bachelorette”
Luke Parker, known as “Luke P,” had been very open about his Christian faith since the premiere of this season on ABC.
It’s something that initially drew Brown to him but also created tension when the two discussed their views on sex before marriage.
On the “Hometowns” episode, Parker took Brown to church and everyone she met in his hometown of Gainesville, Ga., seemed to sing his praises.
Parker is a member of Christ Place Church, where he has taught Sunday school, is part of a small group, and regularly volunteers with the college ministry, according to the Gainesville Times.
During Sunday School, Parker shared his testimony once again, saying his high school and college days were filled with “chasing sex and entangled and caught up in sin of all kinds” until one day in the shower when he heard God say, “Luke, let go and follow me.”
The 24-year-old contestant said a huge weight was lifted off him.
“Anything that you look at as negative in your life, I want you to know that God is going to use that for positive,” Parker told the young people in the pre-church class.
Brown admitted on camera: “It’s cool to see that Luke really lives his faith,” and while the two have been on a downward spiral since the beginning, the Hometowns episode seemed to be a highlight for Parker.
As Brown told his family, it became “Luke against the rest of the house.”
Luke has been pegged the season “villain” by the other contestants and mainstream media. Although he spoke of his personal convictions and hopes for his future bride, she took his remarks as condemning and disrespectful.
Parker admitted he had allowed his temper to get the best of him to the point where he threw baloney on another contestant’s lap while on the show, when telling him his words were a bunch of baloney.
Lessons learned?
Parker said on Instagram that he never meant to “judge or condemn Hannah.”
“For me, it was never about getting a rose, it was always about finding a wife who would choose me everyday just as I would choose her everyday,” Parker said, admitting “I made mistakes and no I’m not perfect (crazy right)…I did not represent Christ the way I thought I was prepared to and that has broken me.”
He concluded: “My desire is to put the Father first above all things and share the truth that he has given to us all. Thank you everyone for the prayers always remember speak truth and rid yourself of all hate, let compassion drive your words. Stay tuned. #faithfuloverfamous.”
As for Brown, her choices are down to three: Tyler Camron, Jed Wyatt, or Peter Weber. The final episodes will air July 29 & 30.
An article written by Pastor Bucky Kennedy, someone who knows Luke P, went into further detail about the pair’s discussion concerning premarital sex.
“In my opinion, Luke and Hannah chose to participate in something for which neither was spiritually or emotionally prepared. Both are under a social media microscope and each has been called ‘a bad Christian’ by other believers as well as those outside of Christianity,” he stated.
Luke’s brother Mike accused The Bachelorette of being opposed to biblical gospel.
“The only thing that’s obvious to me is this show is produced by people who are very much opposed to a biblical Gospel,” he said, adding that ABC intentionally edited important segments of the show that indicated early on Ms. Brown shared the same beliefs about sex that his brother had.
“Leaving out those conversations makes Luke look judgmental and controlling when they talk about sex,” he said.
The bottom line for “The Bachelorette”
As the Bachelor / Bachelorette franchise has gone on, the fantasy suite has become widely understood by the contestants and the viewers as the place people have sex, even though the word sex is rarely, if ever, uttered. This matter-of-factness has become increasingly threatening to the illusory romance of the fantasy suite, and the show more largely.
From the beginning, Hannah treats fantasy suiting differently than almost anyone else has. She is psyched for it, and psyched, in particular, about the sex. “Gonna get down in the fantasy suite!” she sings to the camera.
Her first date is with Peter. They spend the afternoon on a boat, then have a romantic dinner and retire to a room inside a windmill. Once inside, they open a box of supplies that includes condoms—the first time they’ve appeared on camera, although it’s likely they’ve been a staple in the fantasy suite all along. The condoms’ cameo is the equivalent of a sledgehammer to the wall: It’s more supportive and open about sex than the show has ever been, an admission that this is what the fantasy suite is for and that the powers that be are all for it.
As noted on slate.com, in Hannah, The Bachelorette has found a “righteous, unabashed, sex-positive” woman, one who is in step with the contemporary moment and yet still “cloaked in Jesus.” The Christian ethos that swirled underneath so much of The Bachelorette’s squeamishness about sex—that it was supposed to be something you did with, if not the person you were already married to, at least the person you were going to marry—gets effortlessly updated by a “God-fearing” woman whose faith insulates her, and the show, from charges of hedonism and immorality. Hannah vacillates between full sex-positivity—“Intimacy is so important to me, I want to be entangled with someone, my body is your body and your body is my body”—and a more provisional, it’s wrong-but-it’s-still-all-right defense—“I have had sex and Jesus still loves me.” But it doesn’t really matter. The show is happy to latch onto her enthusiasm and a whole new gloss on the fantasy suite — as no longer some dirty secret, but a site of “female empowerment.”
–foxnews.com and other wire services
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