This explains everything...

Let me guess, Brian. You're a self acknowledged Dittohead.

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"We're having a pretty good time considering one day we're all going to die." Steve Martin, 1976

 

It's easy to skip lunch after you just vomited.

 

It's always nice to learn more about you Brian. I loved this article:

Some things in life you can count on. The sun will come up. The Washington Redskins think they have another winning team this year. And in those lazy, hazy days of summer, PBS will take your tax dollars and air another offensive agitprop film promoting the righteousness of homosexuality.

It’s becoming an annual taxpayer-hazing tradition of the series "P.O.V.," funded by PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a little radical subsidized boutique called the Independent Television Service. Ten years ago, scores of PBS stations refused to run or delayed airing Marlon Riggs's "Tongues Untied," a salute to black homoeroticism, complete with F-words and grotesque caricatures of male sex organs. By that standard, this year's effort – a film called "Scouts' Honor" – was a calm walk in the park.

"Scouts' Honor" didn't need to have words beeped out, and it didn't get graphic about gay sex. But it was a remarkable salute to Steven Cozza, a 16-year-old kid whose idea of fun is demeaning the Boy Scouts of America at gay pride rallies.

What did the Boy Scouts do to this boy? Nothing. He’s doing this because he’s been egged on by his ultraliberal dad to take a wrecking ball to an American tradition.

Let’s be clear about a couple of things here. When he started this, Steve Cozza was a 12-year-old child without the intellectual development to make an intellectual case on his own. And that makes his father, in my book, a rather wretched person for his cowardly manipulation of his child.

In picking the film, "P.O.V.," Executive Producer Cara Mertes told one reporter, "I think one of the reasons Steven Cozza started this movement was to send his notion of rights for the gay population, but also to share his wonderful experience with the Scouts. It's a really beloved organization and this has been really difficult for people to decide where to come down on."

Steven Cozza started no “movement”; his childish antics are simply being bolstered by the likes of PBS, which put 50 pounds on the scale in favor of those who think the beloved Boy Scouts are a gruesome gathering of gay-hating bigots.

Not even reviewers from liberal newspapers are buying that PBS “balance” canard. "Conservatives may bristle while watching it," acknowledged the Washington Post. "This isn't a news documentary but a sympathetic examination of the personalities involved in trying to change the Boy Scouts' rules," reported the New York Times.

The film's objective is to provoke the maximum amount of sympathy for Steven Cozza and other leftist anti-Scout activists, period.

Other than placing Cozza with his role model, a gay church camp counselor, or watching Cozza making jokes about nuns at a Metropolitan Community Church event, this film has no serious brush with religion. Neither does it ever seek to explore whether Cozza lives up to the Scout Law promise to be reverent, something ignored by the sympathetic reviewers. Instead we get statements from the likes of Times TV critic Julie Salamon, who writes of another of the film's heroes, gay ex-Scout Tim Curran: "Like Steven Cozza after him, Mr. Curran was an attractive spokesman: articulate, good-looking and nonthreatening, except to those who were automatically threatened by his being gay."

This crackpot-alarmism is the direction one takes to sidestep the issue. People who do pay serious attention to what the Bible says can be "automatically threatened" by homosexuality. Practicing it is a very serious sin, along with many other sins that all-too-human believers struggle to avoid. Sin threatens to separate us from God for an eternity. But the "progressive" parade at PBS laughs at fear of sin, for they think that Heaven will be just like their vision for the Boy Scouts, where everybody gets in because their God is first and foremost inclusive.

To the maker of "Scouts' Honor," Tom Shepard, there is no conservative or liberal. There is only forward or backward, enlightened or ignorant. He boasts of the political potential of his film: "The Boy Scouts could be a really useful organization in the new century. Are they going to cling to these antiquated policies of the past or jump on board with contemporary society?"

Shepard and the producers of "P.O.V." celebrate the "voiceless," chatter about "pluralism" and "democracy in action;" but when it comes to putting a serious debate on TV, they won’t give their opponents the time of day. In an hour, we see maybe a minute of fleeting snippets of Pat Buchanan, Rev. Lou Sheldon, and anonymous talking heads opposing the film's heroes. But they are props, there only for viewers to see the kind of insensitivity the "good guys" are up against.

Sadly, it needs to be said once again: You paid for this slop with your tax dollars.

 

your mean

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All hail Fadeaway's Cyberfish -- your 2000-2001 BobFinn* Fantasy Basketball League Champions!

 

Perhaps the next time that PBS discusses racism, they can give racists a national platform to outline all of their arguments. Apparently the door is still open for hatred I suppose, and we just don't know what's right and wrong.

Maybe racism is right, and I just haven't seen that one argument that will convince me. Maybe PBS is just too damn liberal to show me the error in my loving Christ like ways.

Or maybe PBS has a different role than trying to divide the society by bigotry. Maybe a good media will sometimes tell us stuff that we don't want to hear. Maybe a governmental news agency has a larger role... keeping the social fabric together rather than telling one another how to judge each other.

Since homosexuality isn't going to go away, and that the government can't make religious judgments based on the topic, don't you think that a governmental news agency should probably follow through on its governmental role... helping to maintain each individual's ability to pursue a free life?

I do.

Ohhhh... Brian, our first fight.

[This message has been edited by Achebe (edited June 22, 2001).]

 

m head hurts

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"The early bird may get the worm, but so does the bird that finished off the tequila bottle the night before"

 

I would admit to it, but I'm not smart enough to have written something so original!

Oh, brother, it's pages like this that give us responsible lefties a bad name.

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Things do not change; we change. - Henry David Thoreau

 

don't worry Jeff, it's a lot harder to find bs leftie journalism than bs rightie journalism. The lefties at least trick people by being literate and open minded, so they're harder to point out.

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When this guy started smoking 40 years ago, people had no idea it was bad for you. People had to guess based on the hacking cough, shortness of breath, and bloody phlegm

girl you looks good won't you mock that draft up?!

 

Brian, people can make the same arguments for shows promoting racism. Not everyone thinks racism is a bad thing. I don't compare those who are anti-homosexuality to those who are racist...yet, but I do compare the beliefs.

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Can't I just give you some of my sperm? It's really good!

[This message has been edited by Rocketman95 (edited June 25, 2001).]

 

Rocketman95, you're like beyond bizarre or something!

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Rarely is the question asked: Guns kill squirrels than REDRUM to fools across the nation?

 

Yeah, it is much worse for PBS to run a show that is sympathetic to a gay boy (Brian, I like that that website is "objective" enough to point out that homosexuality is a sin...because all sides believe that, right?) than things such as this:


Introduction

Surveys of working journalists have found that they experience pressure from powerful interests, outside and inside the news business, to push some stories and ignore others, and to shape or slant news content. The sources of pressure include the government, which enlists media to support its actions and policies; corporate advertisers who may demand favorable treatment for their industries and products; and media owners themselves, who can use their outlets to support their increasingly various business and political interests.

In a 2000 Pew Center for the People & the Press poll of 287 reporters, editors and news executives, about one-third of respondents said that news that would "hurt the financial interests" of the media organization or an advertiser goes unreported. Forty-one percent said they themselves have avoided stories, or softened their tone, to benefit their media company's interests. Among investigative reporters, a majority (61 percent) thought that corporate owners exert at least a fair amount of influence on news decisions.

One-third of the local TV news directors surveyed by the Project on Excellence in Journalism in 2000 indicated that they had been pressured to avoid negative stories about advertisers, or to do positive ones. And in a 1997 survey of investigative reporters and editors at TV stations published by FAIR, nearly three-quarters of the respondents reported that advertisers had "tried to influence the content" of news at their stations. Sixty percent said that advertisers had attempted to kill stories. Fifty-six percent had felt pressure from within the station to produce news stories to please advertisers.

Of course there are many sorts of pressure on journalists, including the need to tell stories in a splashy, ratings-grabbing way; but the pressures we document here are more direct and nefarious. Practically every working journalist has heard war stories about the articles that were killed or never written, or, more chillingly, of careers cut short for "making trouble," or stepping on the wrong toes. But few accounts exist of these instances of influence, when journalists are thwarted in their attempt to report (in the phrase made famous by Adolph S. Ochs) "without fear or favor."

In this our first annual Fear & Favor report, FAIR takes note of some of the instances from the past year when pressure from powerful interests influenced the news. This report should by no means be considered a comprehensive catalog, but we have collected some of the most outrageous and instructive examples. We hope it will serve to support working journalists who struggle to do their jobs well, and encourage them and the public to continue to demand truly independent reporting.

In Advertisers We Trust

What most of us think of as the content of news media, sponsors see primarily as the context in which their ads appear. Advertisers increasingly push for more control over that context, hoping to deliver their targeted messages in the most conducive climate. While individual journalists may resist, news media in general seem to go to increasing lengths to please big advertisers--watering down or killing stories, promoting sponsor-friendly coverage, and making promotional deals that blur the line between journalism and marketing.


* ABC's The View, co-hosted by Barbara Walters, agreed to turn eight shows into paid infomercials for Campbell's Soup.

Walters, one of ABC's most prominent news personalities, joined her colleagues in introducing pro-Campbell's themes into the talkshow's discussions: In one show, Walters asked her View colleagues, "Didn't we grow up...eating Campbell's Soup?" They responded by breaking into a chorus of the "M'm! M'm! Good!" jingle. In addition to developing special soup segments, The View assured Campbell's that "hosts would try to weave a soup message into their regular on-air banter" (Wall Street Journal, 11/14/00).

ABC claims this kind of hucksterism is OK because The View is an entertainment show. Though Walters is an ABC News journalist, she is "able to wear many hats" (Wall Street Journal, 11/14/00).

* As reported in the Boston Phoenix (4/20/00), the nonprofit Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) was refused advertising space in the Boston Globe in mid-April. NACA intended on paying $25,000 for space to run an ad critical of fees at Fleet Bank.

The Globe apparently vetted the ad with Fleet-- which happens to be one of the paper's major advertisers. The Globe then claimed that some of the information in the ad was misleading, although, according to the Phoenix, the same information is found in Introducing Fleet: Your Guide to Fleet Products and Services, a booklet put out by the bank itself.

* Boston Herald consumer columnist Robin Washington received an indefinite suspension and a demotion to general assignment after his reporting on the Fleet/BankBoston merger.

Washington had written an April 3 story noting that 700,000 BankBoston customers would pay higher fees after the merger with Fleet. Washington said that his editors killed several follow-ups, until he was finally told not to write about the bank merger at all. In press interviews, Washington suggested that the bank's role as a big advertiser and a lender to the paper may have had something to do with the editorial decision. (Washington Post, 5/1/00) Washington added that the paper had warned him previously about the perils of covering businesses that were also advertisers, saying that editor Andy Costello told him that "there were certain realities to the business that I needed to understand."

At the end of April, the Herald announced that Washington was suspended without pay (Boston Globe, 5/1/00). After protests by the Newspaper Guild and the Boston Association of Black Journalists, Washington was eventually reinstated to his original job.

* Time magazine's Spring 2000 issue was the culmination of the magazine's "Heroes for the Planet" series. Launched in 1998, the series "profiled individuals around the globe who are working to protect the natural world" (Time, Spring 2000). But Time made clear from the outset that not all environmental issues would get equal treatment. That's because the "Heroes for the Planet" series has an exclusive sponsor: Ford Motor Co. Asked about the conflict of interest presumed by having an automobile company sponsor an environmental series, Time's international editor admitted to the Wall Street Journal (9/21/98) that, no, the series wasn't likely to profile environmentalists battling the polluting auto industry. After all, Alexander explained, "we don't run airline ads next to stories about airline crashes."

Powerful Players & PR

Advertisers aren't the only powerful interests that exert influence on media. There are plenty of companies, industries and lobbies with stories they'd like media to cover, or not cover, or cover in a particular way-- and many media outlets are happy to do business, trading editorial independence for financial gain or "access." Unfortunately, media consumers have little way of knowing which stories have been shaped or shaded by behind-the-scenes deals.

* United Airlines and US Airways cut a deal with the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: We'll give you the story on our upcoming merger, as long as you don't call any "critics" for comment. According to Howard Kurtz, media reporter for the Washington Post (5/29/00), all three papers agreed to this censorious arrangement, which only fell apart because the Financial Times website broke the merger story early, negating the agreement.

Why would a paper agree to let the subject of a story determine how it could be written? Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger claimed to "hate those kind of arrangements" (implying that this wasn't the first), but explained that "if the news is big enough, we'd rather give it to our readers with whatever caveats are appropriate."

New York Times business editor Glenn Kramon likewise accepted this kind of deal-making as the price for being a major player in business journalism: "We've been serious about business news for too long to be cut out of big stories like this, and it's about time we were included."

According to Washington Post financial editor Jill Dutt, balance isn't as important as doing the story quickly: "It does a better job for readers to have the story on the first day than not to have the story," she contended. As a matter of fact, Dutt said, the Post doesn't really need outside experts: "The Washington Post, regardless if no one is called, can give much better background and context for the significant issues involved in the deal." And Dutt sympathizes with corporate executives, who want "a clear shot at giving investors your side of the deal before you get all the naysayers."

* The Idaho Statesman has a curious definition of "fact checking". The business editor of the Gannett-owned daily, Jim Bartimo, resigned when he was told that a story he had worked on about Micron Technologies, the area's largest employer, had to be sent for pre-publication "review"... to Micron Technologies. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported, (1/17/00) the Statesman described letting the subject of a news report review it before it runs as "good journalism," and the possibility of a journalistic conflict "laughable."

Interestingly, in following up on that story, Kurtz learned that the Idaho Statesman's previous business editor says he was fired from the paper for writing too critical a lead on a story about...you guessed it, Micron Technologies. Kurtz's February 7 article noted that the Statesman reporter covering Micron is married to a Micron employee. None of this is a problem for Statesman editor Carolyn Washburn, who says, "It's not that it has anything to do with their being the biggest employer. What we write can affect a lot of people in this community. It can affect the stock price."

* After watching the documentary "Saving the Salmon," television viewers in Washington state probably came away with the impression that the state's timber industry was doing a pretty good job of protecting local salmon. Since the Sept. 28 piece appeared with the logo of local station KIRO-TV, one might have assumed that normal journalistic rules applied.

Not so. Though the logo appears, the documentary was actually a half-hour infomercial paid for by the Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA), a timber industry group whose members include Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade. It seems KIRO and WFPA have a deal that guarantees a certain amount of advertising and programming. The KIRO producer who worked on the piece, Pat Fisk, works not in the station's news division, but in advertising.

As the Seattle Weekly reported (9/28/00), "The only hint that something was amiss--beyond the strangely biased content of the program itself--was one brief announcement at the beginning that said: 'The following program was produced in cooperation with the Washington Forest Protection Association.'" Environmental advocates or critics of the timber industry were nowhere to be found in the program.

The WFPA's Cindy Mitchell confirmed that the group is "in partnership with KIRO," but said she wasn't sure "whether to describe the program and the short announcements as PSAs, commercials or something else." "I don't know the difference," she told the Seattle Weekly.

* Local station WBAL-TV in Baltimore, Maryland aired a series of reports on women's health, for which they received a "hefty fee" from Baltimore's Mercy Medical Center (Business Week, 2/28/00). Business Week explained that such deals are increasingly common, thanks to companies like Medstar Television, which brokers deals between hospitals and TV stations, and also produces the segments. Medstar wouldn't divulge their fees, but Business Week found one proposal indicating an annual charge of $364,000 for "two news spots per week."

TV stations like WBAL claim their editorial integrity isn't compromised ("We decide what story to do," WBAL news director Princell Hair told Business Week.) But Medstar, for its part, is fully conscious that what it's doing is using the news to sell. "A PR agency or TV sales department can guarantee that an organization's physicians will appear on TV commercials," its proposal boasts. "But they can't guarantee the physicians will be on the news, the most credible source for health information."


* Brill's Content is in the media criticism business. But according to media critic James Ledbetter (www.newyorkpress.net, 4/17/00) the magazine watered down a piece in the May 2000 issue whose subject-- entertainment reporter Lynn Hirschberg-- may have had too many powerful media friends. Ledbetter reported that Brill's editor David Kuhn got nervous after receiving pre-publication complaints from some of Hirschberg's bigwig supporters, and, Ledbetter's sources say, Kuhn gave staffers this classic explanation about why the magazine had to be careful: "You don't understand: I have to go to cocktail parties with these people." David Kuhn denies making the statement attributed to him or anything resembling it; Ledbetter stands by his sources. (The writer of the piece, Katherine Rosman, later told Ledbetter that she had "toned down" her piece herself to avoid being "ad hominem.")

The Boss's Business

Media owners are also themselves a source of pressure on journalists; their interests, on issues from the parochial to the national, have a way of making themselves known to editors and producers, who are encouraged to shape coverage to suit. Of course, today's media outlets are often huge commercial enterprises all their own, with corporate ties to other companies and industries. As corporate America consolidates, there are fewer entities that aren't part of the boss's business, making them that much less likely to receive scrutiny.

Increasingly, the thing a media owner wants their outlet to promote is another media property. Call it "synergy" if you must, using news media to promote a product controlled by the same owner is still an example of undue influence. Are reporters and producers making judgments about what's newsworthy based on journalistic values, or marketing values? Are stories without a corporate tie-in as warmly received as those with one?

* In the final days of the 2000 presidential campaign, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime conservative activist, ordered all photographs and prominent mentions of Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore removed from the front page of the paper. As a result, the paper's pre-election Sunday edition had a front page featuring George W. Bush in every campaign-related headline and photograph. A story about a Gore rally held in Pittsburgh, originally slated to run alongside a Bush piece on the front page, was moved to the inside of the paper. According to an account in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (11/8/00). Tribune-Review managing editor Robert Fryer "tried to dissuade Scaife but was overruled."

* High-tech gizmos often have a special place on local TV news. Even more so when the TV station's parent company is behind the new invention.

The Belo Corporation invested $40 million in a company called Digital:Convergence that manufactures a bar code-scanning device called :CueCat. Those using :CueCat on their personal computers can scan the bar codes on advertisements, calling up more information about that product.

According the Dallas Observer (9/21/00,) Dallas station WFAA-Channel 8 ran segments about :CueCat three nights in a row in September on their news broadcast. WFAA is owned by Belo.

In a related story, Wall Street Journal technology reporter Walter Mossberg criticized :CueCat in an October column, saying the device "fails miserably" in terms of convenience and raises privacy concerns in the way it identifies users, and concluding that it "isn't worth installing and using, even though it's available free of charge" (Wall Street Journal, 10/12/00). As also reported by the Dallas Observer, (11/2/00) one outlet that had run previous Mossberg columns, the Providence Journal, didn't carry it that week. The Providence Journal is also owned by Belo Corporation.

Providence Journal executive editor Joel P. Rawson told the New York Times (11/6/00) that the paper was holding Mossberg's column in order to run it, along with other reviews, when :CueCat began distribution in the area on November 12. But a subsequent search of the Nexis database and the Journal's website failed to find it.

* Since the 1999 merger, new media giant CBS/Viacom has embarked on a frenzy of cross-promotion, some of which looks very much like favoritism. As noted by TV Guide's J. Max Robins (TV Guide, 8/19/00) both VH1 and MTV (Viacom properties) planned to run specials on Bette Midler before her CBS series, Bette, debuted in October. And when CBS broadcast the Super Bowl, MTV was picked to produce the half-time show. "We've tried to get the Super Bowl for years but never got anywhere," said MTV president Judy McGrath. "Now we've got it. You do the math."

* A sock puppet was interviewed three times on ABC News programs: twice on ABC's Good Morning America and once on Nightline. That's a pretty high media profile for a sock, but then again it was no ordinary sock—this was the corporate "mascot" for pets.com, a website that sells pet supplies. It's also a website that counts ABC's parent company Disney as one of its investors.

Disney's 5 percent stake in pets.com wasn't disclosed on the news programs, and it's hard to see that as an oversight. The January pets.com press release announcing the deal with ABC gave the distinct impression that the company fully expected to be inserted into programming, including the news. The release said that, among other goodies, pets.com would "receive marketing and promotional support on the ABC, Inc. media properties."

Oddly, given their evident assessment of pets.com as a significant story, ABC devoted virtually no coverage to the company's November demise.

* An August New Yorker profile of ABC News president David Westin by Jane Mayer (8/14/00) included a number of comments from ABC insiders, who chose not to identify themselves, referring to an "atmosphere of self-censorship and timidity." For example, "when a producer at 20/20 considered doing a piece on executive compensation, two people familiar with the deliberations say, the idea was dropped because no one wanted to draw attention to the extraordinarily rich pay package of Disney's chairman, Michael Eisner." Also: "News executives decided not to shoot a feature story about a cruise ship partly because Disney owns a rival cruise line. Similarly, news producers decided not to do a feature piece about the hit movie, Chicken Run, because they thought it would give free publicity to Disney's corporate rival, DreamWorks. 'No one here wants to piss off the bosses,' one producer explained."

* Clearly, not all journalists bridle at being asked to promote their parent company's ventures. Steve Friedman, executive producer of CBS's Early Show, for example, seemed genuinely proud of his news programs' Herculean efforts to generate "news" items out of the network's popular primetime show Survivor. Explained Friedman on CNN's Reliable Sources (7/8/00): "Look, it's a hit show on CBS. If I didn't take advantage of it, I should be fired for malfeasance."

What about the idea that news programs were about, well, news, and that there is a line between news and entertainment? Friedman scoffs. "That line was over a long, long time ago....That line is long gone. Now you can lament and say it's terrible. You can say it's over, the civilization is over. You know what, to compete you've got to compete. And we are in this to win. And we will use this show to help us win."

* In Buffalo, New York, a local television anchor was suspended from his station after he refused to edit a news story to favor the local police commissioner. Anchor Rich Kellman of NBC affiliate WGRZ was told by the station's management not to return to work until further notice after he refused to edit an interview with Buffalo Police Commissioner Rocco Diina to remove a reference to Diina's troubles with the Buffalo police union. According to the Buffalo News (2/22/00), local journalists were "up in arms over what they [saw] as a successful effort by a newsmaker to control the content of a program."

happy, achebe?

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Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence-their speech centers are destroyed-except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

[This message has been edited by rimbaud (edited June 25, 2001).]

 

rimbaud, if you really expect people to read that monstrosity, you should italicize it, not bold it. I had to back up 5 feet from my desk just to read the first paragraph.

BK, I suppose I am still at a loss as to what the opposing viewpoint should be in this particular documentary. If I understand your intuition, you feel that it's strange for a private organization to be told how to act. I suppose I've echoed a similar intuition recently by indicating that, IMO, same sex marriages and polygamous relationships are noone else's business.

I do see pretty distinct differences though. The 'nuclear family' or whatever we want to term as 'relationships between consensual adults' is truly a private matter. The Boy Scouts aren't truly a private organization... they use schools, government facilities (military bases, etc.), etc.

But this is a sparkler anyway. Technical reasons as to why the BSA gets to remain homophobic, don't discount the fact that the BSA is homophobic. Texaco had racist policies and it was possible to punish them for their actions b/c they a) make money and b) are of a certain scale. Texaco making a profit or having a million employees is tangential to the fact that their racist actions were wrong.

So again, what opposing viewpoint should be shown in this documentary? Are homosexuals inherently evil? Are homosexuals all thieves? Are homosexuals all murderers? WWJCD?

 

I guess you responded while I was writing Brian (had to find a yummy Peach, mmm...). I also suppose I was wrong, and that you're not too concerned w/ the 'private' nature of the BSA. That there is in fact, some reason, some 'opposing viewpoint' that you think should be aired. Although, to be honest, I haven't the slightest clue what that would be.

Greater merit?

On what grounds could you possibly find fault with a homosexual? WTF? Are you serious? Are homosexuals inherently evil? outlaw, what the hell are you guys doing down there to BK?

Is this a religious issue BK? Most of the churches that I've been exposed to argue that homophobia is a sin (I was primarily an Episcoplian w/ every 4th sunday as a Catholic, sprinkled w/ a little bit of Eastern Orthodox on the top. The Catholics aren't very accepting, though most of their leaders are homosexual. Father Tom of the Greek Orthodox Church in Greenville wouldn't have argued for the gay lifestyle, but he certainly wouldn't have argued that we should become intolerant either).

So we're taking polls now? Perhaps we should have done one back in 1800. Perhaps we should have polled white men in the early 20th century as to their opinions on women's rights.

To me Brian, these movements are linked. Cultural viewpoints always evolve and conservatives inevitably become more tolerant as time passes.

[This message has been edited by Achebe (edited June 25, 2001).]