Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, conservatives boycotted — a lot. Organizations regularly sent out snail-mail letters listing companies that deserved to be rebuked. Back then, it was mostly for supporting Planned Parenthood or pushing smut on TV.
Who can forget the outrage over David Caruso and Dennis Franz baring their butts on NYPD Blue in 1993? That seems relatively tame compared to the disgusting content portrayed on TV these days, especially on the thousands of streaming channels. Conservatives back then argued that nudity shouldn’t be shown on TV because children might be watching. The other side argued that kids shouldn’t be awake at 10 p.m., and anyway, what’s wrong with a little nudity? Despite dozens and perhaps hundreds of boycotts, Dennis Franz bared his butt on network TV anyway.
Reflecting on the series in 2018, Franz said, “The partial nudity was one of the requests that [producer] Steve [Bochco] strongly asked for in the beginning of the production from the network.”
“He wanted to push the envelope quite a bit. So a lot was made of that. I always had great respect and admiration for his uncompromising artistic vision. He just didn’t want people to tell him what he couldn’t do. When you think about it, a great painter, you can’t tell them, ‘You can’t have this or that color.’ That’s the way Steven was as a writer and as a visionary.”
It’s all about “art” and “pushing the envelope,” the culture be damned — literally. These people believe it’s their moral duty to change society — to rid it of all social norms and our antiquated and bigoted values.
Back then, we signed petitions, called ABC, sent op-eds to the newspaper, and called our friends to encourage them to boycott, hoping the network would cancel the show.
Now, twenty years later, nearly everything coming out of Hollywood is designed to offend and push that proverbial envelope. You can’t let your kids watch cartoons or a Disney movie without them being subject to left-wing groupthink and indoctrination. It’s all about shaping public morality — by promoting immorality. More specifically, they are degrading public morality and replacing it with a strict adherence to woke ideology. A movement that once preached freedom and reveled in standing against “the man” has become “the man,” and we’re now all expected to bow to their idols.
We fight against a culture that is increasingly liberal and depraved. We’re no longer a nation with a shared Judeo-Christian ethic. Wokeism is the progressive god, and a loss of revenue is the price they willingly pay to appease their deity. Unless and until we can mainstream our values again — and that’s a big if — our culture will continue to deteriorate.
I’m a Christian, so I take a longer view of these things. The Bible tells us that “in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power.” That sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
But take heart! God wins in the end! That gives me hope for the future — meaning a future in heaven.
Even so, that hope is tempered a bit by the depravity around us and the human frustration of watching our great country fall before our eyes.
I’m very glad to have a job where I don’t always have to worry about saying the wrong thing or offending overly sensitive scolds. I’m thankful for the community we have built here. I always tell people that we have the smartest readers on the internet. Since putting our comments section behind the paywall, it’s become a sanctuary for those of us who are outside the mainstream of the culture—a culture where many of us have been shamed or even shunned.
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