Ok, ok. We know you’ve been waiting for it. So we’ll get it over with.

Here’s the problem with a film like I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry: The essential problem that undermines any attempts the script makes to convert viewers to have a more accepting awareness of homosexuality, no matter how many times or ways it tries, is that Gay marriage is still illegal in every state but one. If you think it doesn’t matter, try this on for size.

What would we think now of a film that, before Brown Vs. The Board of Education, depicted two white people who dressed themselves up as black people to get into a black-only school to take advantage of the limited scholarships and programs that the school had to offer? Probably not very highly.

A movie similar to this came out in the 1986, if you remember it. The movie was called Soul Man and starred C. Thomas Howell, who played a white rich kid who, suddenly stranded by his mid-life-crisis-having father, finds himself applying for a black scholarship in order to pay his Harvard tuition.

I’m not going to take sides on this movie, but I will say that by the time the film was made, segregation in government funded educational institutions had be judicially outlawed for three decades. This is not to say anything about the realities of racial prejudice, which are real and unfair and still chug along perniciously in our culture. But the fact is that at least legally, equal opportunity was a legally established precedent by the time Soul Man surfaced.

It reminds me of a moment on Charlie Rose, when he was interviewing Mel Brooks. He said something like (with an I’m-cool-enough-to-be-in-on-the-joke smile on his face), You make fun of everybody! The blacks, the jews, the Italians, [and inevitably] the gays…

The one and only problem with this kind of statement, which is the platform on which most of these contempo-comedic stabs at gay people take is that if you make fun of everybody, then it’s okay to make fun of gays. Tina Fay was infamous for this on SNL. I can’t remember a single weekend update that she anchored where she didn’t make some kind of gay joke. She sadly carried this annoying trait into the set of her solo show, 30 Rock.

BUT THE PROBLEM IS THAT OF ALL THESE KINDS OF DEMOGRAPHIC FUN POKING, HOMOSEXUALS ARE STILL NOT LEGALLY REPRESENTED UNDER THE LAW.

In this sense, I think it’s about thirty years premature to group gays in with blacks, hispanics, women (a situational minority), jews, and even disabled people. There just isn’t the same kind of judicially or legislatively established precedent that gives gay people equal representation under the law.

Until then, movies like this, while they may help nudge along a more inclusive national awareness in terms of sexuality, exploit an unresolved and largely contested crisis in civil liberties.

Up next, Chuck and Larry Illegally Emigrate to Mexico.