Bill Maher Slams Ryan Reynolds For Apology Over Plantation Wedding Because Everything is Racist So Get Over It, Also Jesus

HBO host and comic Bill Maher tore into actor Ryan Reynolds for his recent apology for getting married on a plantation, reasoning that because so much of America resides on grounds touched by slavery, we should all just either move on or also “cancel” Jesus.

On Friday’s edition of Real Time with Bill Maher, host Bill Maher devoted the main section of his “New Rules” segment to savaging Reynolds.

The actor apologized recently for his 2012 wedding to fellow actor Blake Lively:

“It’s something we’ll always be deeply and unreservedly sorry for,” he says. “It’s impossible to reconcile. What we saw at the time was a wedding venue on Pinterest. What we saw after was a place built upon devastating tragedy. Years ago we got married again at home—but shame works in weird ways. A giant fucking mistake like that can either cause you to shut down or it can reframe things and move you into action. It doesn’t mean you won’t fuck up again. But repatterning and challenging lifelong social conditioning is a job that doesn’t end.”

But Maher took offense because he sees no difference between a former slave plantation that is still advertised as a plantation and a dance studio.

Last week Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively apologized for having their wedding 8 years ago at a plantation in South Carolina. And while I’m sure we could all do better in being aware of the presence of racism including in the past, if this is the new rule, it’s going to be hard to go to a lot of places in the South. It was kind of one big plantation.

And not just the South. The stock exchange is two blocks from New York’s first slave market. And in 1991, construction on a new building in lower Manhattan unearthed a massive slave burial ground from the 17th century. Among the businesses that stand over that ground today are a dance studio and a ballet academy. So people are literally dancing on those graves.

Because America, America is Poltergeist. We are all six degrees from genocidal assholes. if we start turning history into a big game of guilt by association, it never ends. are we really going to make everyone apologize for standing somewhere that humans used to stand when they were even more barbaric than they are now?

The remains Maher referenced were reinterred in a 2003 ceremony, and now reside at a portion of the land that was set aside for the African Burial Ground National Monument.

Maher then went on to argue that to be consistent, we would need to “cancel” God and Jesus, a brave stance for a guy who literally made a whole movie about being an atheist.

Watch the clip above via HBO.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.