For the past few weeks, the Media Research Center has been leading a campaign to get ABC to strangle before it happens — to abort, if you will — a planned show based on the early life of activist and sex advice columnist Dan Savage.
The MRC has misled in its campaign, claiming that ABC “plans to air” the Savage based show when it has only ordered a pilot episode and has not green-lighted the series. While the MRC claims it’s only concerned about Savage’s “unspeakably vile statements” — which, by the way, have nothing to do with the content of the proposed ABC show, which is about a teenage boy coming out as gay — its hidden agenda runs much deeper.
MRC chief Brent Bozell inadvertently revealed the endgame in an April 9 Associated Press article:
Even without Savage’s involvement, Bozell said his group would probably oppose the show.
“Would a show like this bother me?” he said. “Sure. It makes a political statement. Where is the market demand for this? You might even resign yourself that this is the way that it is, but when I heard it was Savage, I gasped in disbelief.”
In other words, Bozell is opposed to the fact that gays would be depicted on TV — that is, if they aren’t being denigrated. Apparently, any gay person on TV is a “political statement,” despite the fact that Bozell can’t identify any actual politics in a sitcom pilot.
Bozell has had a lot of anti-gay freakouts over the years. For example, his reaction to CNN’s Anderson Cooper coming out as gay was to sneer that Cooper can “give us his expert opinion on teabagging now,” and he declared that gay characters on TV mean “indoctrination” of viewers and that the characters “never face any real opposition to the gay agenda.”
Bozell should stop pretending his crusade isn’t only about Savage.