Melissa Joan Hart has people riled up again, and this time, it’s for more than just complaining about the Kardashians on 9/11.
You know how the Atlantic is spawning huge, deadly hurricanes in rapid succession? Melissa Joan Hart posted about one of them in a way that many of her followers found to be painfully insensitive.
It was bad enough that she deleted it. … That was the right call.
Back in the ’90s, Melissa Joan Hart was one of the most famous faces out there.
Even before she was starring in movies, she dealt out life lessons on Clarissa Explains It All.
She was and remains best known for her starring role on Sabrina The Teenage Witch.
It was the keystone of ABC Family’s “TGIF” lineup, a couple of decades before the network became Freeform.
(By the way, they’re doing a new Sabrina show — as a spinoff of Riverdale. They just announced it today and I’m super excited)
I fondly remember watching Sabrina as one of the rare times when my parents would let us eat in front of the television like real people instead of enduring family conversations.
Since then, most of the cast have faded into relative obscurity (or voice acting).
The woman who played Aunt Zelda now shows up as the bad guy on various crime shows (NCIS, The Closer, Castle, etc).
As for Melissa Joan Hart? She shows up on camera sometimes, but these days she’s mostly just a mom. And she’s not usually controversial.
But this time, she absolutely was.
In a now-deleted Instagram post, Melissa Joan Hart posted a photo of a weather report that read:
“Maria has officially made landfall on the Caribbean island of Dominica as a Category 5 hurricane.”
A lot of us have been following the news of yet another massive, powerful storm developing in the Atlantic during such a short time.
In Melissa Joan Hart’s case, she had a personal motive for keeping her eye on the weather.
What brought on the backlash was her caption:
“And just like that, our family vacation is canceled. Such a bummer but we plan to hit the @nickresortpuntacana resort another time this year.”
That is, admittedly, an insensitive response to the news of such a devastating storm.
Comments were, as you can imagine, mixed.
Among them were supporters, detractors, and people with more nuanced views.
“I think you should be more concerned with the people that live there instead of your meaningless vacation.”
See, that one has such a hostile tone. They could have said that one without “meaningless,” you know?
“Wow…”
That one’s honest. (My first thought when I read her caption was “whoa”)
“Better safe than sorry. We do not want anything to happen to you or your family.”
That one’s a gentle way of reminding her that Category 5 storms routinely kill people.
And then she had her defenders.
“Calm down people, she can be a caring person and disappointed at the same time. It’s called being human.”
People can care about lots of things at once. Feeling frustrated that my dinner hasn’t arrived yet doesn’t mean that you don’t care about, like, world hunger or whatever.
Melissa Joan Hart definitely did the right thing by deleting the post, though.
To be fair, Melissa Joan Hart has stirred up controversy before.
She leans conservative — she even costarred with Sadie Robertson of Duck Dynasty in the film, God’s Not Dead 2.
She also backed Gary Johnson in 2016, which … was arguably the least favorable year to be one of the celebrities endorsing a third-party candidate, considering the consequences.
But none of that is, like, dire stuff. She’s a far cry from James Woods or worse.
And again, her usual response to news of disasters is to link to charitable options and to offer up her prayers for the victims.
This was, we think, just a mildly insensitive post to update people on her life.
