http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/29/features-ireland.php
JUNE 10 - 16, 2005
The New Blacklist
Corporate America is bowing to anti-gay Christian groups’ boycott
demands
by DOUG IRELAND
Spurred on by a biblical injunction evangelicals call "The Great
Commission," and emboldened by George W. Bush’s re-election, which is
perceived as a "mandate from God," the Christian right has launched a
series of boycotts and pressure campaigns aimed at corporate America
-- and at its sponsorship of entertainment, programs and activities
the Christers don’t like.
And it’s working.
Just three weeks ago, the Rev. Donald Wildmon’s American Family
Association (AFA) announced it was ending its boycott of corporate
giant Procter & Gamble -- maker of household staples like Tide and
Crest -- for being pro-gay.
Why?
Because the AFA’s boycott (which the organization says enlisted
400,000 families) had succeeded in getting P&G to pull its millions of
dollars in advertising from TV shows like Will & Grace and Queer Eye
for the Straight Guy.
P&G also ended its advertising in gay magazines and on gay Web sites.
And a P&G executive who had been given a leave of absence to work on a
successful Cincinnati, Ohio, referendum that repealed a ban on any
measures protecting gays from discrimination was shown the door.
"We cannot say they are 100 percent clean, and we ask our supporters
to let us know if they discover P&G again being involved in pushing
the homosexual lifestyle," growls the AFA’s statement of victory over
the corporate behemoth, "but judging by all that we found in our
research, it appears that our concerns have been addressed."
The Wall Street Journal reported on May 11 that "P&G officials won’t
talk publicly about the boycott. But privately, they acknowledge the
[Christer] groups turned out to be larger, better funded, better
organized, and more sophisticated than the company had imagined."
But the P&G cave-in to the Christers is only the tip of the iceberg.
In just the past year and a half, AFA protests and boycotts -- or even
the simple threat of boycotts -- have been enough to make a host of
American companies pull their ads from TV shows the Christers consider
pro-gay or salacious.
Desperate Housewives has lost ads from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty
Mutual, Kohl’s, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog and Lowe’s after the AFA’s
One Million Dads campaign targeted the show’s sponsors.
Life as We Know It got the same AFA treatment -- and lost ads from
McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John’s International,
Chattem and Sharpie.
And it’s not just programs on the broadcast networks and their local
affiliates that are feeling the heat from the Christers.
When the AFA targeted Comedy Central’s South Park, the popular cartoon
satire saw ads on the show pulled by Foot Locker, Geico, Finish Line
and Best Buy.
Nissan, Goodyear and Castrol stopped running ads on The Shield after
AFA complaints.
Sonic Drive-In pulled its ad support from The Shield after a single
e-mail request from AFA’s Rev. Wildmon.
S.C. Johnson and Hasbro ordered their ads taken off He’s a Lady when
it got the AFA treatment.
And the list goes on . . .
Call it a new, 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not advertise" if the
religious primitives smell sin.
Just two weeks ago, the AFA undertook a new letter-writing campaign
aimed at Kraft Foods (makers of Oreo cookies, Maxwell House coffee,
Ritz Crackers and the like) for supporting the "radical homosexual
agenda."
Kraft’s crime?
It’s a corporate sponsor of the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago.
Founded in 1980 by Dr. Tom Waddell -- a 1968 Olympic decathlete --
these Gay Games VII will bring gay athletes from all over the world to
the Windy City for a complete catalog of Olympic-style competitions.
The honorary chairman of the Chicago Gay Games?
The city’s mayor, Richard Daley, who declared that he is "committed to
the success of the 2006 Gay Games because it is an expression of
international goodwill and a celebration of the lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender communities, which are important to Chicago."
But, following the AFA’s lead, another Christer group -- the Illinois
Family Institute (IFI) -- has asked its members to take on Kraft and
five other Illinois companies that are sponsoring what it calls the
"Homosexuality Games."
Proclaimed the IFI:
"By allowing their corporate logos to be used to promote the ‘Gay
Games,’ Kraft, Harris Bank and other sponsoring companies are
celebrating wrong and destructive behaviors, and showing their disdain
for the majority of Americans who favor traditional morality and
marriage."
Here’s a nice touch:
The IFI’s Web site features a statue of Abraham Lincoln, who some
historians now credibly say was gay or bisexual.
Will Kraft stand up to the pressure?
The company’s answer to this protest campaign is, for the moment, yes
-- but for how long?
All across the country, the Christian right and its allies in the
culture wars are mobilizing -- sometimes spurred on from the top by
the AFA, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and similar
national groups, but with increasing frequency local pressure
campaigns and boycott threats are self-starters.
They target everything from local broadcast outlets and local cable
operators to libraries, bookstores, playhouses, cinemas and magazine
outlets.
"The Christian right is incredibly mobilized," says Joan Bertin,
executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, a
30-year-old alliance of 50 nonprofit groups.
Bertin says, "There’s been an explosion of local book and arts
censorship -- a lot of activity by an emboldened grassroots, who think
they won the last election on moral grounds. They barely need to
threaten a boycott to get those they target to back down -- hey,
nobody had to threaten to boycott PBS to get them to back off
Postcards From Buster."
Bertin affirms that "This new threat from below as well as above has
already achieved a widespread chill" on creative and entertainment
arts throughout the country.
A good example of successful up-from-below pressure in making
corporate America bend the knee to the Christers: the Microsoft Corp.
Earlier this year, under pressure from a local protest led by Ken
Hutcherson -- a conservative National Football League linebacker
turned preacher -- Microsoft made a decision to stay neutral in the
fight over legislation in Washington’s state Legislature banning
discrimination in employment against same-sexers, although many other
companies headquartered in the state took positions in favor of the
bill.
But after an avalanche of counterprotests to Microsoft about their
cave-in to Hutcherson, from their own employees (many of whom are
gay), gay groups and the blogosphere, Microsoft reversed itself and
supported the anti-discrimination bill.
Too late:
Two weeks earlier, the bill had been defeated by just one vote in the
state Senate.
Now, Microsoft is being targeted by a new, national Christer protest
campaign for having flip-flopped again.
Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg
School of Communication at USC, calls the new Christer offensive a
drive toward "theocratic oligopoly. The drumbeat of religious fascism
has never been as troubling as it is now in this country," adding that
"e-mails to the FCC are more worrisome to me than boycotts" in terms
of their chilling effect.
Even The New York Times is feeling the chill.
At the beginning of May, an internal committee of 19 Times editors and
reporters, who’d been asked how to improve the paper’s "credibility"
with a wider swath of America, came up with a key recommendation:
Deliberalize the paper’s news columns, especially through more
coverage on religion from a sympathetic point of view.
The committee’s report, "Preserving Our Readers’ Trust," added that
"the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example,
approaches cheerleading. By consistently framing the issue as a civil
rights matter -- gays fighting for the right to be treated like
everyone else -- we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in
many corners of American social, cultural, and religious life."
Oh, "disturbing" to whom?
Why, to the Christers, of course -- whose e-mail complaint campaigns
against the Times are legion:
It’s the paper the fundamentalists love to hate.
So why is the Times -- one of the few newspapers in the latest
available study of circulation released earlier this year to
significantly increase circulation rather than lose it -- feeling the
need to kowtow to the religious opponents of gay marriage?
The paper’s willingness to do so is about as frightening a testimony
to creeping theocracy as one could imagine.
Is the new Christer anti-gay and anti-sex crusade a back-to-the-future
nightmare?
Remember your history:
In the 1950s, the anti-Communist owners of a small chain of
supermarkets in upstate New York started threatening the TV and radio
networks with boycotts of sponsors’ products if they employed any
persons listed as supposed Communists or lefties, in a sloppily
researched little pamphlet called "Red Channels."
It didn’t take long for this small protest to instill fear throughout
the broadcast industry, and the result was the Blacklist, a witch-hunt
that lasted for years -- even after John Henry Faulk, the blacklisted
star CBS-radio host and actor, won his landmark $3.5 million libel
suit in 1962 against the blackmailers of AWARE Inc., which -- for a
suitable fee -- offered "clearance" services to major media
advertisers and radio and television networks, investigating the
backgrounds of entertainers for signs of Communist sympathy or
affiliation.
But Faulk didn’t work in national broadcasting for another 13 years,
until he landed a spot on the TV series Hee-Haw in 1975.
It took that long to end a quarter-century reign of terror in the
entertainment industry, 18 years after Senator Joe McCarthy was dead
and buried.
Today’s Christer protests are targeting a different kind of
subversion.
Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the labor-funded Political Research
Associates, has spent over 25 years studying the far right and
theocratic fundamentalism.
He is co-author of Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for
Comfort.
Berlet -- who was one of the speakers at a conference last month
co-sponsored by the N.Y. Open Center and the City University of New
York Graduate Center on "Examining the Real Agenda of the Christian
Right" -- says that "What’s motivating these people is two things.
First, an incredible dread, completely irrational, of a hodgepodge of
sexual subversion and social chaos. The response to that fear is
genuinely a grassroots response, and it’s motivated by fundamentalist
Christian doctrines like Triumphalism and Dominionism, which order
Christians to take over the secular state and secular institutions.
The Christian right frames itself as an oppressed minority battling
the secular-humanist liberal homofeminist hordes."
The key to those doctrines is what fundamentalist religious primitives
call the Great Commission, which is basically an injunction to convert
everyone to Christianity. In the Bible (Matthew 28:19-20), it says,
"Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: Teaching them to
observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you . . ."
The fundamentalist interpretations of these and other texts can be
found on evangelical Web sites like Thegreatcommission.com,
Transferableconcepts.com and Gospelcom.net.
They have incredible motivating power for the religious right, and
help explain the vehemence of the Christers’ intolerance of the
freedom of others to think or act differently.
Says Berlet, "The re-election of Bush was a sort of tipping point for
these people, who take it as a mandate from God -- they see that the
leadership of America is within their grasp, and when you get closer
to your goal, it’s very energizing. It reaches a critical mass, in
which the evangelicals feel they have permission to push their way
into public and cultural policy in every walk and expression of life."
All that, says Berlet, is what is motivating the skein of Christer
boycotts, protest campaigns and censorship drives bubbling from the
bottom up -- which get added emotional and pressure power from the
fund-raising-driven crusades launched by political Christer
organizations like AFA at the national level.
The confluence of from-above and from-below is a powerful mix.
There’s one big problem:
Nobody at the national level is tracking these Christer censorship and
pressure campaigns in a systematic way, to quantify them or assess
their impact, so that strategies to defeat them can be developed.
"People for the American Way used to track this stuff, but they
stopped doing so systematically in 1996. We at Political Research
Associates would love to do it," says Berlet, "but we don’t have the
resources. Groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy
Institute or Americans United for Separation of Church and State could
easily do this sort of work. But none of us has the money to do it,
because nobody wants to give it. There used to be three major
journalists writing about this stuff -- Sara Diamond, Russ Belant and
Fred Clarkson. But none of them could make a living doing it, and
they’ve all dropped out of the game."
Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast industries, all
want to live through an epoch of increasing content blackmail and
blacklists, the wealthy folks who make a lot of money from those
industries better wake up and start funding intensive and systematic
research on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against
sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts -- or soon it will be
too late, and the "theocratic oligopoly" of which Martin Kaplan speaks
will be so firmly established it cannot be dislodged.
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://www.rightard.org/
End Republican race hatred: http://www.thedarkwind.org/
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