Well, if Republicans are actuallly now in the majority, I think you may be right about this.
If you meant something else, such as the minority among liberals, for instance, or the minority of people who are concerned about quashing discussion of alternative family constellations, I quite frankly suggest that you have no idea what you are talking about. But that is not new, now is it?
Use enough lube and you can slide a Mack truck in, let alone a subliminal message.
More precisely, the government uses the notion of “publicly owned airwaves” as a license for asserting rather sweeping control, limited only by its own forebearance and the (distressingly rare IMO) occasions where the courts tell the political branches that they’ve gone too far this time.
I think my analogy (that if the government had stretched its legitimate role in road traffic regulation as far as it’s stretched its legitimate role in broadcast-interference regulation, we’d have the equivalent of Soviet internal passports) is a valid thumbnail description of the situation.
Well, it wasn’t conservatives that tried to stop people from having the chance to read David Horowitz’s reparation ads, was it?
It wasn’t conservatives that insisted on university ‘speech codes’.
It wasn’t conservatives that have championed “hate speech” as a category of speech to be prohibited.
I believe Homebrew when he distances himself from that stuff, but I contend that these things are fairly characterized as initiatives from the left.
As opposed to the right, which has no agenda to promote, right?
There’s a thread in GQ discussing where if you pile enough of that stuff together, it catches on fire!
Of course the right has an agenda.
The right’s agenda is not hypocritical in this regard, however. They seek to suppress things like a show where Cindy has two mommies, yes. But they don’t trumpet themselves as free speech champions, either. In other words, their agenda may be distasteful to you, but it’s consistent. Homebrew is an example of the other side of the coin - a liberal, but a First Amendment absolitist. That puts him in the minority of liberals. Which is what I said.
That’s a pretty facile list, Bricker. Students who are notoriously reactive don’t count as a general attempt by liberals trying to stop Horowitz’s ad.
The ACLU opposes hate speech bans and college speech codes.
Your attempt to make it seem that Liberals are behind these mistakes is disingenous.
Bricker, I’ve never heard it from you, but I’ve heard lots of conservatives claim that they are free speech champions, and it’s the left that wants to muzzle its opponents.
E.g., I haven’t listened to Rush in a while, but he used to be pretty vociferous on this.
From my perspective (I’m left of center on some issues, right of center on others), it seems that all lockstep ideologues (right or left) have a blind spot to their side’s transgressions.
Or at the very least, tend to see them as necessary evils for the greater good.
How did we get off on another free speech tangent? Failure to provide government funding does not equate to suppression. We’d be legitimately talking about suppression of ideas if the government revoked the licenses of all privately run stations that aired programs with gay characters. The way things are going, that would pretty much end television in American completely if it were done.
Look, if the government is going to provide funding for childrens programming, **someone **in the government is going to set standards of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. We surely are not debating that no standards should be used, only **whose **standards should be used. In this case, it appears that SecEd and the PBS producers actually came to the same conclusion (per the Washingtion Post link I provided earlier).
I find it hard to believe that the writers of this show thought the subject matter would not be controversial. We all remember the “Heather has Two Mommies” and “Daddy has a Roommate” bru-ha-ha several years back.
Anyone interested in exposing his kids to the idea that gay families are OK can avail himself of books or videotapes designed for that purpose. The moral of this story is if you’re going to rely on government funded television to teach your kids social values, you better be OK with them learning the social values acceptable to the country as a whole, and that those social values might not be your own.
JM: * The moral of this story is if you’re going to rely on government funded television to teach your kids social values, you better be OK with them learning the social values acceptable to the country as a whole, and that those social values might not be your own.*
But that “moral” isn’t relevant here, because a majority of American people in “the country as a whole” support civil unions for same-sex couples, such as Vermont has legalized. The country is strongly divided about gay-led families, true, but it’s totally misleading to suggest that “the country as a whole” is opposed to them.
Clearly, demanding that all references to families headed by same-sex couples be removed from children’s programming is not a “social value acceptable to the country as a whole”. Homophobic fraidycats in the DoE ought not to be trying to pretend that it is.
Put that way, fine, and I’m sorry I misperceived your point. Though, honestly, I don’t believe it’s a “minority of liberals” who support free speech even when it disagrees with them. I think most do, and the ones who (a) are noisily opposed to the expression of contradictory ideas, or (b) are so offended by a contradictory idea that they speak up without thinking through the implications of their comments, are the ones who attract the attention – just as Ann Coulter gets more press than you.
Okay, first, because, unusually, you don’t seem to be comprehending clear English:
The mention of the lesbian couple was casual, simply a brief statement about the girl’s family. It was not an endorsement of anything except, perhaps, the idea that such families exist – despite the head-in-sand attitudes of some of the most arrantly homophobic “religious” conservatives.
Second, how dare you decide what are “the social values acceptable to the country as a whole”!!! If there were one thing that would get me off the First Amendment free speech values, it would be comments like Ann Coulter’s “liberals are traitors” and that little remark.
I don’t fucking care what percentage of the country supports your perspective and what percentage supports mine – there is no consensus. And for you to arrogate to yourself the right to decide that your values are “acceptable to the country as a whole” and mine aren’t, is egotism of the first order, and you deserve far worse invective than I can think up for doing so!
Are you next going to say that disagreeing with you is unAmerican? Do you have a list of 202 PBS officials who are card-carrying members of Al-Qaeda, perhaps? That high horse ill-becomes you, John, and I for one would appreciate a withdrawal of that comment and an apology.
You’re harshing my buzz, dude. John has made it fairly clear that the doesn’t share that particular bias, only that he recognizes its existence. I agree that he is probably mistaken as to its pervasiveness, but I’m willing to believe its an honest mistake.
My objection based on what you’ve posited is that it’s not a realistic portrayal of life in this country. Shows which don’t include blacks, asians, hispanics, handicapped, and on and on don’t accurately project midstream America. There are gay people in your community, and they pay taxes, as well as pledge to PBS, NPR, et. al. Programming should embrace their interests, too.
Certainly it is a parental responsibility to address these issues. That said, children should not be educated in a vacuum, otherwise it fails to be education. Perhaps I’m laboring under an antiquated notion, but I thought that education involved learning about everything, including concepts and ideas foreign to the norm.
The country as a whole includes gay people, and as such, I see your closing statement as contradictory.
JM: *Look, if the government is going to provide funding for childrens programming, someone in the government is going to set standards of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate. *
And in the very article you linked to, we saw what the standards were that the government set for this programming:
In other words, the show is explicitly about diversity, with the intent of appealing to as many different kinds of children as possible, which seems to be exactly the sort of thing that the program’s “overall objective” mandates. The DoE has not made any objections to any of the other kinds of diversity showcased on this program, or complained that it wasn’t fufilling its objective.
How is this episode any less “educational for preschoolers” than any of the very similar episodes that show different activities and regions involving Hmong, Native American, Muslim, Mormon, and Orthodox Jewish children, which the DoE seemed to be just fine with? Is tapping a sugar maple in Vermont somehow intrinsically less “educational” than clog dancing in Kentucky?
Sorry John, you cannot successfully defend this attempt to kill the episode as any kind of consistent application of educational “standards”, or expression of “social values acceptable to the country as a whole”. On the part of the DoE, this is hypocritical exploitation of a controversial issue, plain and simple. And on the part of PBS, this is a hypocritical attempt to dodge a controversy and negative publicity, plain and simple.
Did you read the statement from the PBS guy in the article I linked to? Regardless of what Spellings position is, he clearly stated that PBS decided the reference was NOT casual. Here it is again (Wilson is a PBS:
Your disagreement appears to be with PBS, not with me.
Perhaps you can quote the post where I advoacted any social values other than that I personally support gay rights including gay marriage. You won’t be able to, because I haven’t.
You clearly have no idea what my socail values are.
Your off your rocker on this one, dude. I’m not apologizing for the strawman YOU constructed.
John:
My anger, which was disproportionate, was founded in this paragraph:
If I have misconstrued the key phrase, underscored above, in a post made by you in a discussion in which you are, evidently, defending the concept that the Secretary of Education, appointed by Mr. Bush, may threaten PBS funding over an incident in which a same-sex couple are mentioned (the degree of mention is relevant, but since my case seems to be undermined by a PBS apologist, let us disregard that for purposes of resolving this contretemps), then be so kind as to clarify what you did mean, and I will humbly apologize for the misconstrual.
It seemed to me to be clear that you were asserting that the social values inherent in “not exposing children to the fact that there are same-sex couples in the world, even in passing” were those “acceptable to the country as a whole.” Which is, bluntly, on the one hand, winning an argument by begging a question – assuming the values of one side to be those “acceptable to the country as a whole,” when that is fundamentally what the entire Pit thread is about – and on the other, playing the “you’re not a true American unless you agree with Bush values” game – which is calculated to piss any patriotic Democrat or independent off.
I’ve been intemperate – I hope this post explains why. If you would be so kind as to rise above my show of temper and explain how you intended that phrase to be read, you have my sincere regrets for reading it as I did – and I only condition that apology because I fail to grasp how else you might have intended it.
Okay, not that I LIKE the woman, but can we please stop referring the Department of Education head Margaret Spellings as ‘she’? If ‘she’s’ really a ‘he’, I’d say she has more to answer for and worry about than whether or not Postcards shows a lesbian couple.
And I just watched the ABC news story about it (It’s on the Yahoo front page if anyone’s interested), and this just infuriates me. They showed a clip - I can’t believe parents don’t have something better to do.
All this incident will teach children of gays and lesbians is that for some unknown reason, because some people don’t like it, they should be ashamed of who they are and who their parents are. Is that REALLY something we want these kids growing up to think? It’d be nice if these conservative Christian parents would TRULY think about the children, instead of their own twisted agendas.
E.
Be thankful for small blessings. They’re making themselves look silly.
Most Americans aren’t really bigots. It takes an effort to hate. If you phrase the question as an imposition, “look, they’re taking marriage”, that’s one thing. But if you phrase it like “should we avoid even mentioning these people?”, that’s quite another. Americans may resist if told someone is taking something from them. If lied to, in other words.
And that’s why this sort of thing is so dangerous to the Trog Right: it depicts how normal it all is, that these people are pretty much like us, save for that one peculiarity, which is no wierder than being colored, or Mormon, or any of a thousand different minor human variations.
When they make themselves look like unreasonable uptight assholes, they advance the cause of freedom. Let’s help them!
It’s a show about diversity, fer chrissakes. How people are not all the same. Not many families have exactly one mother, one father and 2.4 children and stay together forever.
Show Mormons (just imagine!), Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Pentacostal Christians, Hmong; everything is just peachy-keen. Divorced parents, single parents, remarried parents, whatever.
But show a happy, well-adjusted family which includes a lesbian or two, just like real life, and the Sec of Ed pops her bigoted ass in the picture and says, “Not on my watch!”
To me, this shows more about the disfunction of the protester than the producer. Only a twisted, ignorant mind would have this extreme reaction. How does someone like this become a Sec of “Education”? Hunh??
I say, show the show, and it’ll be the biggest non-issue to ever hit Vermont.
Well, here we go. PBS can still apply for Ready to Learn grants for their programming. But where before they were given the grant money as a matter of course and administered the program themselves, now they have to apply for it and compete with other entities for the money.
It’s probably a good thing that they do so. For nearly every other instance of government contracting, we insist on transparancy and accountability on both ends. There should be no reason why public broadcasting has an exemption when it comes to taxpayer money.