If the movie Philomena shows up on your Netflix page, skip it.  It is dumb, and it is dangerous.

The premise is that two four-year-old children, a boy and a girl, are sold away from their mothers by evil Catholic nuns who are enslaving the mothers in a convent.

Then the stereotypes really kick in.

On what would have been the boy's 50th birthday, his mother, Philomena, decides to find him.  The two children were raised in the same affluent American family.  Of course, their adoptive father was a real bad guy, although in unspecified ways.  But lo and behold!  The boy grew up to be a homosexual – male-model gorgeous, brilliant, marvelously successful – who works in the White House alongside presidents Reagan and Bush.  He is a loving and compassionate man, who also went in search of his mother.  The little girl grew up to be a heterosexual woman.  She is an ugly, stupid harridan who screams at her children from inside a woebegone trailer.  She is heartless and cares nothing about her birth mother.

Despite the fact that the valiant Philomena is still a devout Catholic, she has no qualms, religious or moral, about her son's lifestyle and no hint of curiosity about how he contracted the HIV that killed him.

The film goes out of its way to disparage President Reagan – who hailed from Hollywood, who was wholly tolerant of homosexual people, and who was unabashedly proud of his ballet dancer son.  But that is not sufficient glory to the magical sodomite archetype.

The film becomes dangerous when it sneers at Republicans who claim that AIDS was caused by the gay lifestyle.  Of course the AIDS epidemic became entrenched in America because of the behaviors of homosexual men.  No reasonable person can dispute that fact.  The behavioral choices of homosexual men enormously amplified the lethality of a virus, which is transmitted by bodily fluids, and turned it into a widespread scourge.  Those behaviors still do.

It is sad to see an assemblage of great British actors waste themselves on left-wing melodrama.  It is worse that they cannot see that they are sanitizing and selling lethal anti-morality that continues to exact a terrible human toll on those they are trying to champion.