I'm one of those earth-hating hypocrite liberals who talks a good game about saving the environment but who doesn't have the self-discipline to turn off a TV when I leave the room. I mean, yeah, I have the curly light bulbs that use 1/4th the energy, but I leave them on 10x as much, so it's not really a win for mother earth.
It's something I'm working on, but honestly, my energy-saving consciousness has a long way to go. In the meantime, however, my child-protective consciousness is right where it should be. I carefully regulate what my 8-year old watches on TV, and my wife and I haven't used a curse word throughout the entire Bush administration (OK, that last sentence is only half true).
What I'm getting at is that when I leave the room, I may not be thoughtful enough to turn off the TV, but I at least like to make sure it's not tuned to anything harmful. And aside from the occasional kidnapping story or Morning Joe (which my daughter confuses with "the Saddle Club" anyway), I've been pretty comfortable leaving it tuned to MSNBC. Until, today, when they ran a commercial that I just don't want to have to explain to my kid.
See, all of my wife's friends are gay. It's not by design, it's just the way it is. Maybe she's like the "safe" straight friend they can open up to. Maybe they find her an odd curiosity being married as she is to a bald hairy ape-creature. Who knows, who cares. The point is, these friends have children, and picnics, and barbecues and my daughter has grown up understanding that those are normal families just like her own.
So you can imagine how these "anti-miscegenation" ads just don't work for us, and kind of cross a line into what I consider "inappropriate TV". Now while I'd expect to have to exercise some parental control over most of HBO, and most primetime network television, and basically anything with monosyllabic character names (I'm lookin at you, Zack and Cody), I don't expect to have to worry about it on my news network, at least not during the commercials.
So please MSNBC, think of the children. Get this filth off my air. thanks.