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Once upon a time...

Many could have accused PBS of having a liberal bias in the past. Now though PBS has decided to cater to the right.

First, it was giving Tucker Carlson his own show. Then after Bill Moyers left NOW they cut the program from 1 hour to 1/2 hr.

And now PBS is pulling a childrens episode from its series Postcards from Buster. Buster apparently visits children and their familes: pentecostal, lutheran, mormon, catholic, single parent, children living with their grandparents and children living with lesbian parents.

This was too much for Education Secretary Margaret Spelling who decided the one million children living in gay households are to be shunned and ignored. She got PBS to pull the episode where where Buster visits children living with lesbian parents.

Your tax dollars at work.

You can read more here:

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2005/0 ... 105_03.txt


and here:

http://www.nbc5i.com/family/4137085/detail.html

If you are as I am, totally disgusted with this you can complain here:

http://www.hrcactioncenter.org/actionce ... id=3186848

-LanceMan

All the more reason not to have taxpayer-funded television. Just my humble free-market capitalist opinion.

Nostradamus wrote:All the more reason not to have taxpayer-funded television. Just my humble free-market capitalist opinion.

Ahh, you would love it in Nevada, a libertarian bastion if ever there was one. Very little receives tax payer funding here: schools, cops and mental health care to name a few.

-LanceMan

Interesting take Nostradamus, if I understand correctly rather than solving the problem of discrimination you'd rather make the discrimination acceptable by having it privately funded.
Wasn't the nearly exclusively weak and annoying programming enough for PBS' bad image, do they really need to come out as anti-tolerance too?

lance wrote: This was too much for Education Secretary Margaret Spelling who decided the one million children living in gay households are to be shunned and ignored.

No, not shunned and ignored. They don't exist, right? Gay households aren't real, right? We can't let our kids know that there is the possibility of a different childhood family experience other than father & mother, Christian upbringing in a nice home that is big enough for the family.

[/sarcasm]

In a way, not showing gay households might be a blessing in disguise. I'm for the aknowledgement of diversity, but if all the righties see it and get they're granny pannies in a bunch. Then their rightwing FCC and gov't might make it an even larger issue than they already have and set us back another 20 years in the process. I'm not saying it should be brushed under the rug or anything, but is now the best time to fight that battle?

I'm torn in regard to strategic delays in fighting for what's right. Without educating the younger generation and exposing them to those who are 'different' a day may never come when the time is right.

grim4746 wrote:I'm torn in regard to strategic delays in fighting for what's right. Without educating the younger generation and exposing them to those who are 'different' a day may never come when the time is right.

Nothingman and Grim4746,

I understand and share your concern about when to "fight the good fight" and when not to.

I don't think politicians or gay activists are of one mind on this either, even in the same party. Last year Representative Barney Frank thought the US was not ready for Gay marriage in any legal sense. Meanwhile Mayor Gavin Newsome of San Francisco encouraged gay marriages. Bill Clinton advised Kerry to come out in favor of some of the statewide anti-gay marriage/civil unions amendments that passed widely last fall. Kerry (to his credit IMHO) declined to do so.

I think this is the last great civil rights fight the US is facing. In that vein didn't people tell Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Eugene Dubois, the NAACP and other groups that America wasn't ready for integration or interracial marriage.

Maybe the reality is that most of America isn't ready for gay marriage or to publicly acknowledge that healthy, happy kids are being raised in gay households. I don't think though that this means that everybody just gives up and goes home and hibernates for 20 years.

There is danger in telling a public that it is okay to deny a group of Americans legal rights. Thus the slippery slope argument. If gays and lesbians can't adopt, can't get married then maybe its not that big of a deal if you fire them, deny them rent or look the other way if their property is vandalized or if they are physically hurt or intimidated.

-LanceMan

I couldn't agree with you more, lance. I don't have a lot of information, but I think that if a person is a US citizen 18 or older, no matter what, they should have every right to marry whomever they choose. IMHO.