LA: The Christian right and its allies in the culture wars are mobilizing

[iconoclastic cat]

This is terrifying. We NEED to get our shit together. These people are going to destroy this country.

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/29/features-ireland.php

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.
***********

Holy fuck. You guys don't even want to know what was going on in my mind when I read this. We have to do something before it's too late.