In order to keep up with the crazy things they say, I subscribe to the e-mail list of Human Events, a clearinghouse for right-wing bluster. Painful though it may be, I read all of their e-mails, and occasionally report on my disturbing findings (examples here and here).
But these adventures did nothing to prepare me for the Parents Television Council, a conservative morality-in-media group famous for its hysterical fear of Janet Jackson's nipple. The PTC also caught my attention a while back when it claimed that "millions of families" were "offended" and "assaulted" by Jane Fonda's accidental use of the word cunt on Good Morning America. (Fonda, if you're wondering, used the word properly, in a conversation about the play The Vagina Monologues.) I wrote to the PTC to report some other lapses in taste which I thought might interest them, and since then I've contacted them occasionally. Today, I bring you the latest.
This -- I promise -- is quoted verbatim from the most recent e-mail circulated by the PTC:
On Sunday night (January 3rd), the Fox broadcast network program American Dad featured a man masturbating a horse.
We're sorry to be so explicit, but you need to know exactly what's airing on broadcast TV -- the public airwaves that YOU own -- and on an animated program that is one of the most popular programs with children as young as 2-11.
If you believe that masturbating a horse violates the federal broadcast decency law -- the law that prohibits broadcasters from airing indecent material when children are likely to be in the audience -- then we urgently need you to take action now.
Sadly this isn't the first time that television writer Seth MacFarlane has featured bestiality on the public airwaves. But with your help, hopefully we can make this the LAST time.
And here is my response:
Dear PTC,
I am writing to applaud your denunciation of the vile animated program American Dad, and its recent decision to profane the airwaves with a man masturbating a horse.
If only I had known about this before it was too late. After viewing the program last Sunday night, my eight-year-old son Gary raced out of the house with great urgency. When my wife Bonnie and I asked where he was going, he slammed the door in our faces -- a level of disregard he has never previously shown us. We found him outside, in the barn, masturbating a horse.
Children, as you are well aware, often imitate the behavior they see on television. Rather than blame Gary -- or ourselves -- for this transgression, we calmly told him that we loved him very much and were not angry, but that the media had failed him, and that it was inappropriate for a young man to masturbate a horse. But Gary, exhibiting some of the qualities recognizable in hardcore drug addicts, just kept masturbating that horse, giggling maniacally.
At this point, Bonnie had seen enough. "Young man," she shouted, "you stop masturbating that horse and go to your room!" Gary then told us that he knew what he was doing was okay, because he had seen it on American Dad. He said, "I know all my friends watch American Dad, and I'm sure they're all masturbating horses now, and I want to fit in and be accepted, so I'm going to masturbate this horse all night long."
Well, I picked that boy up by his collar, tore him away from the tumescent equine, and marched him straight up to his room. I was quaking with anger at Fox, at Seth MacFarlane, at Hollywood, at the whole crooked system which teaches our children that it's funny to masturbate a horse. I was so upset I could hardly speak, which left the lecture to Bonnie. She was right behind us on the way upstairs: "Masturbate a horse, will you? Well, when you grow up and move away you can masturbate as many horses as you want to, but under my roof you play by my rules, and one of my rules is don't masturbate horses," etc.
We left Gary to ponder these lessons and went back downstairs to watch King of Kings, Nicholas Ray's 1961 classic about the life of Jesus. We were just beginning to enjoy ourselves and forget the evening's trauma, when the doorbell rang. It was late -- who could this be? We opened the door, and there, holding a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of wine, was the horse.
Sincerely,
Noah Diamond
Click here for more fun with the Parents Television Council, and here for more on the horse menace.