The Christian Right's Blacklist

The Christian Right has been engaging in an increasing number of efforts to stifle speech and ideas that they find offensive - which means the expression of ideas they disagree with. In particular they have been targeting advertisers who, in turn, are pulling ads from shows and media which offends the Christian Right.

Doug Ireland writes:

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. ... 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.

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.

Says [Chip Berlet, senior analyst at the labor-funded Political Research Associates], “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.

The Christian Right does believe it has a mandate to take over the nation — not merely from the most recent presidential elections, but from their basic ideology as well. They see America as a "Christian Nation" entrusted by God with the task of bringing True Christianity and True Democracy to the world. America is the new "City on the Hill" and Americans are the new Chosen People — or, to put it more bluntly, America and Americans are the True Israel.

Unfortunately for the Christian Right, their electoral success has not translated into general cultural success. Rather than being able to take the nation back to the 1950s, things like abortion and gay rights have actually moved forward over the past couple of decades. Every year that things move forward, the harder it will be to take things back and they know it. This has been incredibly frustrating and so they have been seeking any and all means possible for changing the wider culture. More widespread boycotts appears to be their latest tactic — but will it bring them any success?

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