Zones

Previous posts of mine have touched on what does the religious right want? The recent Monday Night Football controversy highlights this. So what if a starlet pretends to throw herself naked at a football star? What are you, some kind of prude? (Or racist prude since she is white and he is black?) Are you to tell the rest of us we can't have skits like this because they upset your oh so fragile sensibilities?

No. I don't expect a world where such antics are forbidden. All I want is fair warning. All I want is a zone where I can raise my children and I can choose when to introduce sensitive topics.

I remember a few years ago when Whoopi Goldberg emceed the Academy Awards, and when introducing Liam Neeson, simulated masturbating the Oscar statue. Wonderful! Fabulous! As a friend of mine put it, great! Now I can't let my kids watch the Oscars anymore either, then!

So that's it. I'm right wing. I'm religious. So I guess I'm part of the religious right. I don't want to tell you how to raise your kids. If you want to introduce them to the real world of sex and adultery at whatever age you want, that's your business and not mine. But I want some sphere of public life where I get to raise my kids as well. If I make the decision that I would rather wait to introduce these topics until they reach an age where earlier generations would deem it appropriate to introduce them, then I want that ability without having to lock my kids up in the house and never letting them turn the TV on. I want to be able to go to the mall without seeing huge posters at Victoria's Secret with models in poses wearing "outfits" which would make a prostitute from an earlier generation blush. I want to be able to watch a football game with my kids without a Janet Jackson S&M show or a scene where a starlet jumps the bones of a football player. What I am literally asking for is the ability to access a subset of society that merely resembles the one in which my parents raised me. Does asking for this make me the American Taliban?

The Taliban wanted to tell everyone in Afghanistan how to live. I simply want to be left alone to raise my kids with some predictable zones of public life where my kids can remain innocent.

Some think that is too much to ask. Who is imposing on whom?