Whipped Cream Difficulties

Donald Wildmon has passed away at 85. I believe he was mostly forgotten now, but I remember a time when he was a hugely controversial figure in American politics.

Rev. Wildmon was a Methodist preacher. As the story goes, one night at Christmas he and his family gathered around the warm glowing glow of the TV set…and Rev. Wildmon discovered that the TV was full of what he considered to be vulgarity.

He kept switching channels — from a program with an adultery scene, to another with profanity, to a third with a man attacking someone with a hammer — before telling his children to turn off the set and resolving to do something about what he considered immoral content.

To make a long story somewhat shorter, he ended up founding an organization called the National Federation for Decency, which later became the American Family Association. AFA was one of the leaders in the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts:

Mr. Wildmon had sent a photograph in 1989 to every member of Congress of a work by the artist Andres Serrano of a small crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, which had appeared in an exhibition with partial N.E.A. funding. “I would never, ever have dreamed that I would live to see such demeaning disrespect and desecration of Christ in our country that is present today,” Mr. Wildmon wrote lawmakers.

…

Over more than three decades, groups that Mr. Wildmon led boycotted Target stores for substituting the word “holiday” for “Christmas,” ran full-page ads denouncing the 1990s police drama “NYPD Blue” for “steamy sex scenes” and picketed a Hollywood studio over Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which portrayed Jesus as having sexual desires.

The effectiveness of the AFA is questionable. They don’t seem to have any impact on “Last Temptation”, but they got 7-11 to pull “Playboy” and “Penthouse”, and were partially responsible for Proctor and Gamble pulling advertisements from “50 TV shows”.

I’m a First Amendement absolutist, and I didn’t care much for Mr. Wildmon or his organization at the time. But now that I’m older, and see stuff on TV airing during children’s waking hours, I wonder if the man may have had a point.

Of course, there’s alway the V-chip, which didn’t come into existence until 1996…