The "Christers" Are Coming!

Doug Ireland is beside himself with angst at the success of organizations of "Christers," as he calls them, in mobilizing their troops to boycott sponsors of entertainment which promotes sexual license.

He detects a whiff of fascism emanating from the offices of the gentle folks at the American Family Association and Focus on the Family, Ireland calls them "religious primitives," and grabs his readers by the lapels to scream in their face that theocracy is just around the corner, can't you see. Quick, hide the children.

It's all very comical. Here are a couple of examples:

Ireland quotes Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School of Communication at USC, who 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."

Ireland and Kaplan fear that our government agencies are actually responsive to the people's wishes. This ugly recrudescence of dreaded democracy can only lead to trouble. Once the government starts listening to its citizens where does it stop? Auschwitz?

[E]vangelicals feel they have permission to push their way into public and cultural policy in every walk and expression of life.

Imagine the chutzpah of these "Christers" who think they have the same rights as every other American citizen. Where do they get such an impertinent idea? Haven't they learned that religious people, unless they're liberals, are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves, and let the Left alone to run things and impose its values on the rest of the country?

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....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.

What this frantic statement lacks in honesty it makes up for in humor. It's dishonest because what Christian organizations are doing is not censorship and, even if it were, there's nothing illicit about censorship unless it's imposed by the government, and even then it's not necessarily unconstitutional. If corporations are persuaded not to subsidize the dissemination of certain ideas on television networks, that's not censorship. They're making a business decision based on the customer's wishes. If the government, through the FCC, chooses to regulate the content of what's going out over public airwaves, that's not necessarily bad either. It's similar to a public school administrator prohibiting the school library from placing pornographic magazines on its shelves.

Ireland's paragraph is humorous because the overwrought author, in his excitement, tacitly acknowledges what I'm sure he didn't intend to admit: that what Hollywood is engaged in is an attempt to sexually subvert the culture. Mr Ireland is obviously distraught that this noble cause is encountering resistance from people who don't want the culture subverted. Resistance to sexual subversion is an evil, in Mr. Ireland's mind, equivalent to being a fascist.

Or worse, a "Christer."

Thanks to No Left Turns for the tip.