The new passion of the FCC to enforce the obscenity laws surely cannot be the result of the partially exposed breast of Janet Jackson at halftime of the Super Bowl. (Notice I wrote "partially" exposed; after all, she was wearing a metallic pastie of sorts.) To mix a meta-phor, am I splitting hairs?
All of our obscenity laws are about splitting hairs. What I found obscene was Justin’s ripping off part of Janet’s blouse. In a country where violence against women is still very much with us, that’s obscene.
Why is the FCC so steamed? The entire Justin-Janet show and all of the women-hating rap music that accompanied it was done with the full knowledge of the network and the National Football League to accomplish one purpose: Get the youthful demographics they think they need to sell their products. And the Howard Stern Show and all of its dirty-mouthed offshoots are doing much the same thing. The people who listen to that stuff all have the mindset of a sex-starved adolescent male, and they tune in because they know what they are getting.
I’m not going to get upset by the free-speech angle because there is a difference between the public airwaves and cable. If it means in the future you’ll need a satellite receiver to get Stern, so be it. But the public, Congress and the FCC really ought to worry more about the stranglehold that media conglomerates hold over the public airwaves. That’s what’s obscene. That’s the free-speech issue …
The worst part about growing older is that you lose the concept of having a future …
There is one reason and one reason only that Republicans backed a measure to define violence against a woman as two crimes: one against the woman and one against her unborn child, defined as a human being at any stage of development in the womb. That reason is abortion politics.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein called their bluff when she sponsored a bill that would have imposed the exact same penalties, but would not have recognized the fetus as a person. Only four Republicans voted for it, and neither of your senators from Pennsylvania was among them. Despite their protests to the contrary, the Republicans hope enactment of their bill into law will help chip away at abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research.
Another effort by the religious right to foist their politics into the realm of science was fortunately debunked. New studies prove that having an abortion does not cause breast cancer. Now, if we can get them to stop claiming that the use of condoms does not help prevent HIV, we’ll be getting somewhere in the new American theocracy …
The Color of Water, the brilliantly told true-life story by James McBride, is a must-read. McBride is the youngest of 12 children of a white Jewish mother and black father. The mother’s heroic devotion to her family overcomes the horrible bigotry she encountered. I am reminded that the last of this nation’s laws banning the intermarriage of blacks and whites was in effect as late as 1969. We dressed up such bigotry with the name "miscegenation" back then (sounds like an illness rather than love between two people, doesn’t it?).
Young people today are less race conscious than their elders. Less gender conscious, too. You know where I’m going with that one …
What happened to our rape shield laws? Why haven’t the authorities been able to protect the identity of Kobe Bryant’s accuser? If her charges turn out to be true, once again the victim will have been raped twice. She’s demanding that the delays stop so the trial can begin. Whatever happened to the right to a speedy trial? …
I just got my notice from the federal government about the wonderful savings my new Medicare prescription card is going to provide. The notice reads like an ad from the Bush campaign. You’d never know the President’s prescription plan specifically prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices from the pharmaceutical companies. The cost of the program will be enormous, even more than the revised figures provided by the administration after it intimidated one of its employees into hiding the true cost from Congress. And it still leaves many seniors paying big costs …
The attempts by the Bush administration to smear Richard Clarke remind me of what the Clinton folks did to every woman who came forward to tell the truth about philandering Bill: When you can’t refute the truth, kill the messenger.
