This Makes Me Crazy (Rant Ahead!)

I'm not much of a tv watcher.  Don't get me wrong--there are a few shows I watch, and I waste time in plenty of other ways.  I watched more tv when we had Dish and it was easy to see what was on, record what was on, etc.  Not it's not nearly as convenient and I only watch a few things. 

For the last year I've heard from lots of people how great the show Glee is.  I love music & musicals, so I thought it was great that there was a popular tv show with singing on it.  But I never could remember to watch it.

This morning I got an email from an organization dedicated to making television family-friendly.  Periodically it sends out information on tv shows and movies that are acceptable family viewing--without inappropriate content.

It also sends out alerts when shows are family-unfriendly; filled with profanity, sex, and/or violence, and gives information on what you can do if these things bother you.  (Besides turning off the tv.)

This morning's email newsletter was titled

New Fall Season: Not Family Friendly

It then went on to describe the profanity, nudity, and sexuality which have already occurred on television this season--a season that is only a few weeks old.  The email ended with quotes from two CBS presidents talking about their desire to "push the envelope" on what is considered acceptable on tv.  

That's what makes me crazy--many of the people in entertainment, the ones making the decisions, do not care that we don't want filth and garbage on tv.  And so we sit and watch, and every now and then squirm a little because we wish they hadn't said or done that, but it is so funny or we really like the characters or whatever.  And then the next year or later in the season they up the ante a little, and stick in more sex and more profanity and violence and they are just careful to surround it all with hilarious jokes or heart wrenching drama and we keep coming back for more.

Here's a quote for you today, from the email:

Glee creator, Ryan Murphy, has declared that it is his goal in life to remove every barrier to depiction of explicit sex on over-the-air TV. He was quoted saying, "It's tough to get that sexual point of view across on television. Hopefully I have made it possible for somebody on broadcast television to do a rear-entry scene in three years. Maybe that will be my legacy."

Well, Ryan Murphy will have to work on his legacy without me, because what I've read about Glee in the last couple of weeks has turned me from someone who wished they were watching it to someone who wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot pole.

Please don't think I am setting myself up as a paragon of media virtue.  I'm not.  Several weeks ago Russ & I rented and watched a movie I was very excited to see.  We were appalled at the language, vulgarity, and sexuality, but kept watching, thinking surely it couldn't get worse.  It could and it did.  The worst part was that we let Josh watch with us.  In the morning we called him into our bedroom and apologized to him for having made such a mistake in continuing to watch the movie.  Hopefully it was a learning experience for all of us.  (If you're interested in knowing--it was "The Backup Plan.")

I'm going to close my rant with a quote from a talk from Elder Ballard.  This has been a wake up call again for me--to continue to be careful about what I let come into my home.  I didn't think I'd ever say this, but right now I'm really grateful for that moment of poverty that caused us to cancel Dish several years ago.  I'm glad that it's harder to watch tv, and therefore harder for this garbage to get into my home.  Because whatever Ryan Murphy wants, I don't want any part of it.

Ours surely is a time when men “call evil good, and good evil” (Isa. 5:20).

Let me say again that the family is the main target of evil’s attack and must therefore be the main point of our protection and defense. As I said once before, when you stop and think about it from a diabolically tactical point of view, fighting the family makes sense to Satan. When he wants to disrupt the work of the Lord, he doesn’t poison the world’s peanut butter supply, thus bringing the Church’s missionary system to its collective knees. He doesn’t send a plague of laryngitis to afflict the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. He doesn’t legislate against green Jell-O and casseroles. When evil wants to strike out and disrupt the essence of God’s work, it attacks the family. It does so by attempting to disregard the law of chastity, to confuse gender, to desensitize violence, to make crude and blasphemous language the norm, and to make immoral and deviant behavior seem like the rule rather than the exception.   (M. Russell Ballard, 11/93)

Rant Over.