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.
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:
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…
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2024 at 10:13 am and is filed under Obits, Politics, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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I understand how one could be torn about the garbage that television shows. But even though I am a Christian, and I think that things like that have led to the degradation of the morals of the country, I also think that the 1st amendment is among the most important fundamentals that have allowed America to remain an important country this long.
Of course the freedom of speech is just one of the several parts of that amendment. And we see more and more of our freedoms being eroded daily. I myself think that we need to protect ALL of our rights with everything that we have.
The truth is, we might already be too late. But the one thing Americans have always been known for is our unwillingness to abandon important things, just because they are hard. Like JFK said about our “race to the moon”, it may be due the fact that things are difficult that we bring our A game, or more closely to his wording, we choose these things because the are hard.
One thing that has always stuck in my head is the fact that all electronic appliances that we have in our possession have an off switch. And televisions and radios, internet devices, etc. are controlled by us, and not us by them. We as human beings should never forget that, and never let it change. Some nations are not so liberal with the freedoms that we take for granted. I get the idea that many in government and other positions of leadership would like to control more and more of our lives, to our great detriment.
I understand how one could be torn about the garbage that television shows. But even though I am a Christian, and I think that things like that have led to the degradation of the morals of the country, I also think that the 1st amendment is among the most important fundamentals that have allowed America to remain an important country this long.
Of course the freedom of speech is just one of the several parts of that amendment. And we see more and more of our freedoms being eroded daily. I myself think that we need to protect ALL of our rights with everything that we have.
The truth is, we might already be too late. But the one thing Americans have always been known for is our unwillingness to abandon important things, just because they are hard. Like JFK said about our “race to the moon”, it may be due the fact that things are difficult that we bring our A game, or more closely to his wording, we choose these things because the are hard.
One thing that has always stuck in my head is the fact that all electronic appliances that we have in our possession have an off switch. And televisions and radios, internet devices, etc. are controlled by us, and not us by them. We as human beings should never forget that, and never let it change. Some nations are not so liberal with the freedoms that we take for granted. I get the idea that many in government and other positions of leadership would like to control more and more of our lives, to our great detriment.