The pop-music world is turning into a caricature of shamelessness, childish and even spoiled-brattiness. To get attention quickly, some pop stars will try absolutely anything. The soul singer Cee-Lo Green has a new album coming out. How’s this for art: His first desperate single is titled “F— You.”

The shock value is already working. A video was posted Aug. 19, and within four days, it had grabbed 1.4 million views on YouTube — another sign that YouTube is not a safe website for children. On Aug. 23, YouTube began requiring visitors to sign in to view the video, saying it “may contain content that is inappropriate for some users.” That’s quite an understatement. But it’s also meaningless and, besides, it’s unrestricted on Cee-Lo’s personal website: Clicking on his MySpace page brings the song up automatically.

The entire song is obscene. It’s stuffed with 16 uses of the F-bomb in under four minutes, erupting on average once every 14 seconds. It also has 10 uses of the S-word, and even two uses of “nigga.” (Don’t tell Dr. Laura Schlessinger.)

Green’s producer, Bruno Mars, told MTV the whole production was “a dream session come true ... Everyone was just putting their minds together and (we came) up with one of our favorite tracks we’ve ever done. Cee-Lo came in and we started singing it for him. And he’s just, ‘I love that, man. That’s beautiful.’”

This scenario of allegedly unfolding genius dodges the little reality that the supposed high concept is just a musical middle finger. The singer is cursing out his ex-girlfriend, who apparently left him for a richer man. The fact that the song is catchy and bright only heightens the offense. It’s a Motown melody inserted into a manure pile. But, as usual, the Wanna Be Hip critics love it, even with that manure attached. The Wall Street Journal cooed it “may be the best rock and pop single of the year.”

Just a few years ago, we could be certain that a song this stuffed with profanity would never be aired on the radio. In fact, it never would be produced. But the federal judiciary has now made it acceptable to air the worst obscenities at all hours of the day, claiming any attempt to restrict obscene content is a violation of “free speech.” The ban on seven dirty words was shredded and the libertines get where they wanted. What new low will an “artist” stoop to for commercial gain when the ground has suddenly opened, presenting an endless chasm below?

Team Cee-Lo claims they’re going to prepare a radio edit called “Forget You” to avoid alienating too many station managers. How thoughtful. But that only raises the obvious question: Why not call it “Forget You” from the very beginning? The answer is the calculation that millions of teenagers will buy the original dirty version as the official version and put it on their iPods. Any radio edit is just a lame Band-Aid for a pus-filled boil.

The pressure will only build for more and dirtier musical obscenity, just as almost every aspiring stand-up comedian finds it necessary to pepper his and her act with lots of curse words. Comedians can’t just be funny, as singers can’t just sing.

This is not the first time pop stars have played games with the F-bomb. A few years ago, Britney Spears offered a single very thinly disguised as “If U Seek Amy.” Spears boasted, “All of the boys and all of the girls are begging to if you seek Amy,” which only made sense if it was obscene.

The British chanteuse Lily Allen offered her own “F— You” song last year, but it wasn’t a big hit here, with its 25 gratuitous F-bombs. It was only a gold record in France, Australia and Belgium. Right there on YouTube, you can see a video of Allen singing her brightly toned song with its ugly, profane chorus — “F— you, f— you very, very much” — live on French television. The audience claps and claps. Once again, the future beams out at us.

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**Ex-Worship Leader: Why I Left the CCM Movement (Christian Post, 090722)

Dan Lucarini, a former worship leader, had to get away from the Contemporary Christian Music movement.

No, he’s not a fundamentalist “stuck in the old ways,” he says. But he’s a Christian who says he realized CCM was man-centered and unavoidably associated with a spirit of immorality.

While the use of CCM in churches is an old and probably tired debate, Lucarini’s book, Why I Left the Contemporary Christian Music Movement, is in its 20th printing, seven years after it was first published.

“It continues to, I guess, touch a nerve for some folks in the church today,” Lucarini told The Christian Post in a recent interview in Denver, Colo.

When the book first came out in 2002, Lucarini thought it would just be part of the “transitional period” around 2002-2003. But today, people still have the same questions about CCM and about worship in the church.

“I think this is always going to be an issue in Christianity,” he said. “As long as we have churches and Christians and we’re in the world, we’re going to be struggling with how much of the world should we bring in and how fast and at what point do we offend and scandalize other Christians.”

A former rock musician (keyboardist, singer and composer) from the Baby Boomer generation, Lucarini became a worship leader just as CCM was beginning to take over church services in the late 1980s to 1990s. He was a new born-again believer at the time and was happy to use his talents for God. He helped a couple of churches transition from traditional to contemporary worship services.

He thought he had all the right motives and enthusiastically promoted the acceptance of CCM in evangelical and fundamental churches.

“We used the excuse that we wanted to reach out to the young people,” Lucarini said. “You know what? They didn’t like the music. It was our music. It was classic rock. We just did it for ourselves. That was the conclusion I came to.”

“Let’s be honest about it. It wasn’t to save souls. It was just because we like that kind of music and we’re the rebellious generation so we just basically thought we could do whatever we wanted,” he added.

Nearly 20 years later, CCM is a staple in many churches and the younger generation of believers has for the most part grown up on it and thus do not see the controversy in it.

So when Lucarini and other like-minded Christians challenge the popular music style in church services, they’re often labeled as legalistic Pharisees and dismissed because of the generation gap.

But Lucarini reminds readers that they cannot dismiss him as being a traditionalist considering how heavily involved he was in both the secular rock music and Christian praise and worship scenes.

At the heart of his argument is that rock music, and all forms of it, is a music style that was created by immoral men for immoral purposes.

Whether it’s soft rock, pop/rock, jazz, praise and worship, Chris Tomlin, Delirious? or Hillsong, CCM is “scandalous and offensive because of where it came from and what it means around us in the world today,” he argues.

“And I don’t believe that Christians can just take it and sanctify it and call it holy,” he says to those who say it can be used to reach people for God. “I think it’s a mistake.”

It’s like serving a nice juicy steak on a garbage can lid (even if you try to scrub it, it remains a dirty garbage can lid), he explains.

“I can sit and talk to anybody about why I think rock music is the wrong musical language to tie with ‘praise the holy God,’” he contends. “They’re incompatible. You see the results of it everywhere with the tension and church splits and even the younger generation.”

He adds, “I meet a lot of people today that are questioning because they’ve gotten burned out on the worldliness, the entertainment, and the no holds barred ‘we can do anything we want with music’ and ‘God loves us.’ And they just come to the point where they go ‘that ain’t right.’”

In his book, Lucarini strikes back at most of the arguments Christians make to defend CCM, including “Isn’t music amoral?”, “Isn’t this just a matter of personal preference and taste?”, “Show me where the Bible says rock music is evil,” “Isn’t CCM easier to sing than hymns?” and “Isn’t God using CCM to save and disciple teens?”

After his experience with taking teens to CCM concerts, Lucarini believes the harm done (CCM artists, whether intentional or not, role modeling indecent dress and rebellious images, or stirring improper crushes and lustful interests among fans) far outweighs any salvation or discipleship benefits.

He submits to the argument that some would not even give the Gospel message a listen or step into a church without the medium of CCM. But Lucarini ultimately believes CCM is not needed.

“Whenever I face the question that you ask, which is a great question, ‘What about all the good they (churches that promote CCM) are doing?’ Then I got to step back and say, ‘Could that good be done without having signed up for the rest of what they’re doing?’ I don’t know,” he said.

Many Christian leaders argue that music style is a secondary issue or a matter of secondary doctrine and lament internal church conflicts over such matters. But Lucarini rejects that argument.

“It’s very arrogant for people to declare issues that split and divide Christians as secondary. It’s just an attempt to suppress what’s going on,” he said. “Any issue that scandalizes and offends brothers and sisters in Christ cannot be called secondary. At that point in time it’s primary and must be dealt with.”

After more than ten years of leading worship and later questioning the CCM movement, Lucarini says he has come to learn the true meaning of worship.

Worship is not a response to the opening guitar licks of a song, but a response to God’s revelation and who He is.

“Worship, first and foremost, is a personal response to the revelation of God through Jesus Christ,” he said. “And it does not involve me having a self-fulfilling experience. It’s very much a one-sided act as the scriptures teach. It’s acknowledging that God and Jesus are Lord, Master, King. I bring nothing to that equation at all.”

Lucarini advises churches not only to get rid of CCM (anything that has a rock beat influence) but also worship bands and leaders.

“We don’t need anybody to help us worship God,” he said.

Lucarini currently attends a Baptist church in Denver where they sing hymns as well as contemporary songs (not CCM).

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**Study: Sexual Lyrics Prompt Teens to Have Sex (Christian Post, 060808)

CHICAGO (AP)—Teens whose iPods are full of music with raunchy, sexual lyrics start having sex sooner than those who prefer other songs, a study found.

Whether it’s hip-hop, rap, pop or rock, much of popular music aimed at teens contains sexual overtones. Its influence on their behavior appears to depend on how the sex is portrayed, researchers found.

Songs depicting men as “sex-driven studs,” women as sex objects and with explicit references to sex acts are more likely to trigger early sexual behavior than those where sexual references are more veiled and relationships appear more committed, the study found.

Teens who said they listened to lots of music with degrading sexual messages were almost twice as likely to start having intercourse or other sexual activities within the following two years as were teens who listened to little or no sexually degrading music.

Among heavy listeners, 51% started having sex within two years, versus 29% of those who said they listened to little or no sexually degrading music.

Exposure to lots of sexually degrading music “gives them a specific message about sex,” said lead author Steven Martino, a researcher for Rand Corp. in Pittsburgh. Boys learn they should be relentless in pursuit of women and girls learn to view themselves as sex objects, he said.

“We think that really lowers kids’ inhibitions and makes them less thoughtful” about sexual decisions and may influence them to make decisions they regret, he said.

The study, based on telephone interviews with 1,461 participants aged 12 to 17, appears in the August issue of Pediatrics, being released Monday.

Most participants were virgins when they were first questioned in 2001. Follow-up interviews were done in 2002 and 2004 to see if music choice had influenced subsequent behavior.

Natasha Ramsey, a 17-year-old from New Brunswick, N.J., said she and other teens sometimes listen to sexually explicit songs because they like the beat.

“I won’t really realize that the person is talking about having sex or raping a girl,” she said. Even so, the message “is being beaten into the teens’ heads,” she said. “We don’t even really realize how much.”

“A lot of teens think that’s the way they’re supposed to be, they think that’s the cool thing to do. Because it’s so common, it’s accepted,” said Ramsey, a teen editor for Sexetc.org, a teen sexual health Web site produced at Rutgers University.

“Teens will try to deny it, they’ll say ‘No, it’s not the music,’ but it IS the music. That has one of the biggest impacts on our lives,” Ramsey said.

The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the U.S. recording industry, declined to comment on the findings.

Benjamin Chavis, chief executive officer of the Hip-Hip Summit Action Network, a coalition of hip-hop musicians and recording industry executives, said explicit music lyrics are a cultural expression that reflect “social and economic realities.”

“We caution rushing to judgment that music more than any other factor is a causative factor” for teens initiating sex, Chavis said.

Martino said the researchers tried to account for other factors that could affect teens’ sexual behavior, including parental permissiveness, and still found explicit lyrics had a strong influence.

However, Yvonne K. Fulbright, a New York-based sex researcher and author, said factors including peer pressure, self-esteem and home environment are probably more influential than the research suggests.

“It’s a little dangerous to just pinpoint one thing. You have to look at everything that’s going on in a young person’s life,” she said. “When somebody has a healthy sense of themselves, they don’t take these lyrics too seriously.”

David Walsh, a psychologist who heads the National Institute on Media and the Family, said the results make sense, and echo research on the influence of videos and other visual media.

The brain’s impulse-control center undergoes “major construction” during the teen years at the same time that an interest in sex starts to blossom, he said.

Add sexually arousing lyrics and “it’s not that surprising that a kid with a heavier diet of that ... would be at greater risk for sexual behavior,” Walsh said.

Martino said parents, educators and teens themselves need to think more critically about messages in music lyrics.

Fulbright agreed.

“A healthy home atmosphere is one that allows a child to investigate what pop culture has to offer and at the same time say ‘I know this is a fun song but you know that it’s not right to treat women this way or this isn’t a good person to have as a role model,’” she said.

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Rock Group Marilyn Manson (970715)

There is a group booked at the Ottawa Congress Center for August 1st by the name of Marilyn Manson. The significance of this name is that the name was taken from Marilyn Monroe (death by suicide) and Charles Manson. All of the band members have taken on names of serial killers. Their act includes tearing pages from the Bible & desecrating the Bible in various ways. They also throw to the audience condoms and other assorted ‘free sex’ items. The lead singer bills himself as the ‘Anti-Christ Superstar’.

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Shocker Will Rock Ottawa (970722)

Congress Centre won’t cancel Marilyn Manson show, despite local outrage

The Marilyn Manson concert will go ahead Aug. 1, says the president of the Ottawa Congress Centre.

“Mr. Manson is not breaking the law,” David Hamilton said yesterday. “I have no reason to tell him not to come.”

The Congress Centre is getting about 40 calls a day from people upset that it is playing host to the Florida shock-rock act. The Max Bell Centre in Calgary last week cancelled the band’s appearance there and the location of the concert was switched in Winnipeg after protests in that city.

Conservative MPP Garry Guzzo has called on the Congress Centre to re-examine its decision to hold a Manson concert here. He says the centre, owned by Ontario taxpayers, should not be used by a band that goes “over the line,” even naming band members after serial killers.

Mr. Hamilton said the Manson act has as much right to book the Congress Centre as anyone else. If the band does anything illegal on stage, it will face the legal consequences, he said. He declined to say the amount of money the Congress Centre will make from the event.

Roman Catholic parishes in the region have circulated petitions protesting the concert. The Congress Centre has had a lot of calls, faxes and letters.

The band’s latest compact disc is called Antichrist Superstar. Its lyrics, sprinkled with four-letter words, often feature images of abortion and suicide.

One song, called irresponsible hate anthem, includes these lines:

● I am so all-American, I’ll sell you suicide

● I am totalitarian, I’ve got abortions in my eyes

● Let’s just kill everyone and let your God sort them out

In one song, called deformography, the singer says “I will bury your God in my warm spit.” Another, called man that you fear, includes lines such as “All your infants in abortion cribs” and “You’ve poisoned all your children.”

Some of the rock act’s local fans say that the backlash against the band started in the U.S. and spread north, but that many of the rumours about the band’s stage performances featuring sexual acts are untrue.

Michelle Cline, a 32-year-old Ottawa resident and Manson fan, said she saw the band perform in Montreal last fall and the most outlandish moment of the concert was Mr. Manson tearing up a Bible.

“To me it’s nothing more than a show. It gives me an outlet to be angry,” she said, describing Mr. Manson as an advocate of individuality. She said the performance is not appropriate for children.

The bass player wore a dress and women’s make-up and the guitarist wore a miniskirt and stockings. “They’re pretty scary-looking girls,” said Ms. Cline.

She said a small number of fans at the concert wore T-shirts that had messages such as “Kill your parents.”

Ben Rivers, an 18-year-old Barry’s Bay resident, has set up a site on the Internet about the band. He wants to prevent show cancellations and explain the act.

Mr. Rivers says that the dark imagery of the songs doesn’t mean that Mr. Manson is telling people to do bad things.

“‘Be yourself’ is what he’s usually saying,” said Mr. Rivers, who is hoping supporters of the band write to the Congress Centre and insist the concert go ahead.

Mr. Rivers said he isn’t surprised at the protest: “No matter where he goes, it happens.”

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Calgary promoter bans rock group (Globe and Mail, 970710)

The shock-rock group Marilyn Manson has had its July 25 concert in a Calgary auditorium cancelled, the third time the popular band has had a show stopped. Management of the Max Bell Centre, led by Calgary promoter Larry Ryckman, said it had acted because the group, whose members have taken the surnames of serial murderers, violates family values. A spokesman for the band’s Canadian booking agent said the company would seek an injunction against the cancellation and hoped the show would go on as scheduled.

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Rock Star Marilyn Manson Popularizes Christian-Bashing

(Los Angeles, Calif.)—With more than 1 million copies of Antichrist Superstar sold, a Rolling Stone cover and prominent feature in the Los Angeles Times, rock star Marilyn Manson is giving new exposure to Christian-bashing.

Manson, whose real name is Brian Warner, decorates his stage with Nazi-style banners and exhorts thousands of concert-goers, most of them teenagers and young adults, to chant his theme mantra: “We hate love! We love hate!” Thousands of young people dress in black clothes, don dark mascara and lipstick, and pay more than $20 per ticket to hear Manson tell them, “Don’t be oppressed by the fascism of Christianity.”

One Manson fan, 25-year-old Ted Tapia, said Manson is different than other horror rock acts, such as Alice Cooper. Tapia, sporting a mohawk haircut: skull nose ring and black leather vest, said, “The others don’t compare because when they get off stage it’s all fake. With Manson it’s real.” “There has always been a dark side to rock music,” said Bob Waliszewski: associate editor of Plugged In, a youth culture magazine published by Focus on the Family. “This year it’s gotten darker and more anti- Christian particularly because of Marilyn Manson.”

Voice your concern over Manson’s anti-Christian rhetoric. Write to Interscope Records, 10900 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90024, or call (310) 208-6547.

(Los Angeles Times, Jan. 27, Facts on file, Christian Coalition national headquarters)

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Subject: Help and Action required immediately

Mr. Ian Murray and Friends,

I have assembled this distribution list based on either e-mail received from others or my personal friendship with you.

I have just received a call from a friend asking for my help—in both prayer and action by making phone calls.

There is a group booked at the Congress Center for August 1st by the name of Marilyn Manson. The significance of this name is that the name was taken from Marilyn Monroe (death by suicide) and Charles Manson. All of the band members have taken on names of serial killers. Their act includes tearing pages from the Bible & desecrating the Bible in various ways. They also throw to the audience condoms and other assorted ‘free sex’ items. The lead singer bills himself as the ‘anti-Christ Superstar’.

The show was banned from New York, Calgary and Winnipeg (that we know), and the Corel Center said no.

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Manson Rocks On (Ottawa Sun, 970801)

It’s show time!

A judge has paved the way for Marilyn Manson to take the stage at the Congress Centre tonight by ruling his show isn’t illegal.

“Freedom of expression is a fundamental value in our society,” Justice Colin McKinnon said yesterday in his final decision following a day-long hearing.

McKinnon said Manson’s act might well be “disgusting and revolting,” but that isn’t reason enough to cancel the event.

Peter Stock, president of the local chapter of the Canada Family Action Coalition, had launched the bid.

His lawyer, Joseph Hamon, argued the concert should be cancelled because Manson promotes hatred, immorality and violence, particularly against Christians.

Hamon submitted song lyrics and media interviews, and even called up the band’s website in an attempt to prove his point.

Stock also argued that because Manson has engaged in indecent activities elsewhere, the Congress Centre really didn’t have the authority to enter into a contract with the band.

But McKinnon pointed out Ottawa Congress Centre president David Hamilton has given his assurance he will meet with the band and warn them that should they promote hate, obscenity or incite violence, then arrests will be made.

David Scott, lawyer for the Congress Centre, praised McKinnon’s decision.

“There is no evidence of illegality. Good taste aside, the court shouldn’t be controlling what we ought to see before we see it,” Scott said.

The Congress Centre board met for two hours behind closed doors later to discuss the controversy.

Chairwoman Jean Pigott said the board decided to prohibit the sale of merchandise and alcohol at the concert, which is expected to draw a mostly under-age crowd.

Pigott added the group drew up a “due diligence” policy to make sure the Congress Centre looks into future acts more carefully before inking a contract.

“I’d never heard of (Manson) before this,” Pigott said last night.

“We have to do our homework on these groups, especially the controversial ones, to avoid this type of thing in the future.”

Manson fans, meanwhile, hailed the court decision as a victory for free speech.

“The decision means the battle has been won,” said Mike Simons, 17: one of a small group of Manson supporters on hand at the court house for the decision.

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No Substitute For Free Speech: Rocker Succeeds In Fuelling Debate (Ottawa Sun, 970801)

There’s no sense fighting it anymore. It’s Marilyn Manson Week in the Nation’s Capital.

Now, I’ll admit, at the start of the week, I was a little hesitant to get involved with this story. The way I figured it, the media had already given this Manson-guy enough publicity. Why go out and sell more tickets for him?

That worry was alleviated the other day when Congress Centre president David Hamilton told me only 2,000 tickets had been sold for tonight’s show. The hall can accommodate up to 5,000.

So there hasn’t been a rush to buy Marilyn Manson tickets. Maybe we’ve sold a few for this guy, but not many, not nearly what you might expect when you consider the number of trees that have been slaughtered for this story.

So there’s no guilt.

As a matter of fact, instead of boosting ticket sales, a rather marvellous debate has sprung up around tonight’s concert.

A debate on free speech and religion, responsibility and family: late-millennium values and late-millennium mania, a lot of other subjects as well, lofty subjects all, and all over the city — from water coolers to baseball diamonds, bar stools to bus stands — the debate is raging.

Cool.

Those people who have argued in favor of free speech and letting the Marilyn Manson concert go ahead need no better evidence of the rightness of their position than this ongoing debate. That it could be brought about in the dog days of summer, in Ottawa no less, where people welcome the one season of the year where debates are kept to a minimum: strengthens their position even more.

I don’t see how anyone, anywhere along the Marilyn-Manson-is-evil-to-Marilyn-Manson-is-a-genius spectrum can argue this one point: If Marilyn Manson had been banned from performing in Canada, if he had been silenced right at the outset, as his opponents have advocated, then no one would be talking about free speech this week.

No one would be talking about religion. Or family. Or the problems facing today’s youth.

Questions that can really give a person pause — “Is Marilyn Manson simply Ernst Zundel with a microphone?” or “Can there rightly be restrictions on free speech?” or “Is Manson a threat to society of simply a mass-marketed con artist?” — none of these questions would be making the rounds today.

We’d be talking about baseball and bass fishing. Not bad subjects, I grant you, but there is something rather marvellous about a city-wide debate on free speech.

I think we should thank Manson for this turn of events. Walk right up to him tonight at the Congress Centre and shake his hand.

After shaking his hand, we should then engage him in conversation: ask him questions, get him to defend his position on life, assuming: of course, Manson has a position on life that goes beyond grab the money and run.

Ask him how, for one, he can belong to the Church of Satan and yet deny he is worshipping the devil. Saying Satan doesn’t necessarily mean the devil, as Manson has argued, is a rather specious argument. Ask him what other words he has arbitrarily re-defined.

Ask him questions about money. Those are always good. Ask Manson how much money he declared on his income tax return last year. Post the figure on the Internet. Some kids might find that interesting.

Ask him questions about his namesake, Charles Manson, questions he might stumble over, like how far along was Sharon Tate’s baby when it was butchered inside its mother’s womb? Questions like that.

Indeed, ask him any damn question you want, and if you can’t, within three questions, prove Marilyn Manson to be a dull-witted, opportunistic: deceitful, hypocritical, pompous, nonsense-spewing, status-quo-enforcing: Nietszche-mangling charlatan, well, you’re not trying hard enough.

Free speech. There’s no substitute for it. There really isn’t.

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Vandals damage two churches (Ottawa Citizen, 970806)

Priest speculates Manson fans may be responsible

Two recent “desecrations” of Catholic property, including the main church of the Ottawa diocese on Sussex Drive, have caused considerable distress among local Catholics.

The vandalism has also spawned rumours that fans of the rock group Marilyn Manson could be responsible for the wanton acts of destruction.

On Monday morning, a vandal broke through glass and bled profusely as he ransacked Notre Dame Cathedral on Sussex Drive. And sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning, someone lopped off the head of a statue of the Virgin Mary outside St. Mary’s Church, on Young Street west of Preston Street.

“At first I thought it was vandalism, just a bunch of kids,” said Rev. Bill Hunt. “But when I picked up the statue, I knew it wasn’t.”

While on his way out early Monday, Father Hunt discovered the metre-high statue, usually located just outside the church, lying on its back on the sidewalk. The hands had been smashed. The head had been neatly cut off and has not been recovered.

The statue has since been placed on the church’s altar; Father Hunt wants to give parishioners something to think about. He wants church-goers to pray for the vandal, but also to share in a sense of outrage.

Yesterday, police continued to look for another vandal who ransacked Notre Dame Cathedral, the home-church of Archbishop Marcel Gervais. Police have said they have found fingerprints and continue to search for a suspect.

The vandal broke through two glass doors and one window. There was also minor damage to a couple of metre-high crucifixes. There was no damage to a Jesus statue or the tabernacle, where the consecrated communion wafers are held for church services.

“This was really sicko — throwing yourself through the windows,” Msgr. Peter Schonenbach said. “He must have thought he was Superman.”

“It wasn’t severe, it was more of a messy vandalism,” he said. “There was quite a bit of blood all over the place ... but the damage was minimal.”

By 7 a.m. yesterday, clean-up crews had scrubbed blood off the carpets and altar linens.

St. Mary’s Father Hunt suspects the vandal or vandals could be deranged fans of Mr. Manson, the demonic singer whose band caused a considerable outcry in Ottawa in recent weeks.

“I don’t know. That’s pure speculation,” he said. “It’s just kind of weird that (the Marilyn Manson concert) came up in the same weekend the cathedral and St. Mary’s were vandalized.”

He added that St. Mary’s very publicly sponsored a petition to keep the group from playing the Congress Centre. Father Hunt also noted that Peter Stock, the coalition director who launched an injunction to stop the concert, is a member of the parish.

“There is a heck of a lot of anti-Christian, anti-Catholic sentiment happening in Ottawa,” he said. “Here is maybe a small example of it.”

Msgr. Schonenbach had heard rumours that a crazed Marilyn Manson fan was responsible, but he said no evidence he or the police have would indicate that.

He only said that perhaps it was one of the “poor psychos who refuse to go to (psychiatric institutions in) Brockville.”

There was an alarm system in place, but somehow the vandal got past it.

“We’ll have to find new means to protect ourselves against the absurd,” Msgr. Schonenbach said.

Once, churches used to keep their doors open at night. But now it seems members of the public no longer share the same reverence for the institutions as they once did.

Two years ago, following a rash of robberies, the Anglican diocese of Ottawa began to step up its security measures within its churches.

“We were getting to the point where church insurance rates were going up, and we figured we better do something about it,” said Michael Iveson, the director of administration for the Anglican diocese in Ottawa.

“The alarm system did work as a deterrent, and as a result our insurance has gone down.”

Both Catholic and Anglican officials said that burglaries are much more common than desecrations, which occur very infrequently.

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Video games ‘teach sexism and violence’ (CNN, 970919)

CHILDREN are losing themselves in a world of evil foreigners, big-chested women and the need to prove themselves through violence, says an academic study. They are spending too long playing fantasy video games.

The games are being taken more seriously than many adults realise, says Ken Parsons, a senior sociology lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University: “Playing a game can be, and more often than not is, a serious undertaking on its outcome rests their feelings of self-esteem and competence.

“To put it in adult terms, playing a game is a child’s true reality this takes it beyond the boundaries of its meaning for adults. In this sense, there is a danger that children and young people may become addicted to sex, addicted to sexism, addicted to violence.”

In a sample of 61 teenagers 36 boys and 25 girls aged 13 to 16 questioned at youth clubs in Crewe and Dundee, about a quarter feared they were becoming addicted to the games, with about 10 per cent spending more than 30 hours a week in front of the computer screen. One in 20 said they could not live without constant gratification of “beat ‘em up” computer games, such as Street Fighter and Duke Nukem 3D.

The video-fantasy girl, Lara Croft, who stars in Playstation’s Tomb Raider, had become a craze among impressionable adolescents as a “sex symbol with attitude”. Dr Parsons said: “These games encourage sexism and condition children to view the world in a way that they see on a computer screen.

“Men are never rescued by women. Themes of female sex symbols, female kidnapping, female rescue and submission pervade many children’s experiences.”

He identified three kinds of game: fantasies such as Zelda 3 and Dungeon Keeper, brain teasers such as Super Mario Brothers, and blaster games such as Interstellar Assault, Killer Instinct and Fighters Megamix. The games chiefly feature terorists, prizefighters, police teams and robotic detectives. Foreigners were invariably baddies and women were acted upon rather than initiating action, said Dr Parsons.

The study found that a third of parents who generally pay for the games, costing up to £45 each are concerned that their children lack physical fitness, and 10 per cent expressed concern at the anti-social behaviour that such games encouraged. A third of the teenagers had been encouraged by their families to reduce their playing time, one in five had experienced physical strain through playing too much, and 26 per cent admitted they were “too attached” to games and found it difficult to stop playing.

The software in which Lara Croft stars is a bestseller, grossing more than £1 million in the first six months after its launch in October 1996. Dr Parsons describes her as a “gun-wielding baddie-blasting sex symbol, whose very large breasts are designed to be out of proportion with the rest of her body.”

Her female competition includes Q-Bee, a bee woman, who is advertised as being “sexy in her ultra-cute costume”.

Lara Croft’s pin-up picture has appeared as a centrefold in Loaded magazine. The character has a spawned television series and a record, and it has been rumoured that a secret room exists within the game where the player can peel away her clothes.

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Critics Say Video Games Blur Line: Between Reality and Storytelling (CNN, 980601)

ATLANTA — At the nation’s largest trade show for video games, industry officials insist they don’t sell gore to kids and that their games are all in fun.

For critics, that message was hard to hear above a deafening din of computer gunfire and bomb blasts, where banks of new shoot-’em-up software fought noisily for attention.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo here comes a week after the latest in a string of deadly shootings at schools, renewing concerns that frequent exposure to TV brutality has numbed teenagers to gore — and even helped to push some troubled ones over the edge.

“I call it the military training of the mind and body,” said George Gerbner, a telecommunications professor who studies media violence at Temple University in Philadelphia. “Children in many ways haven’t learned the spurious distinction between reality and storytelling.”

While the industry has expanded its array of genres — there are videos from Barbie dolls to fishing — it was clear from displays at the expo that games encouraging users to wound and kill are alive and well.

One new video game unveiled here featured a boy in a white karate outfit whose goal is to kick and beat various opponents. “The killer in me is just beginning,” reads one biography.

The video-game industry points out that there is no evidence the high-profile school shootings in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Mississippi were tied to playing video games or watching TV.

“I think everybody ... has to be concerned with what’s happening with these school shootings,” said Howard Lincoln, chairman of Nintendo of America Inc., maker of the popular Nintendo 64 console. But, he added, “I don’t think there’s any connection with video games and violence.”

Several industry officials at the three-day expo said a ratings system for games launched four years ago has successfully prodded sellers to voluntarily restrict teen-agers from buying violent videos.

“Our ratings are just like the motion picture industry,” said Kazuo Hirai, chief operating officer of Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc., which makes PlayStation, the largest-selling console.

But ratings aren’t foolproof, others acknowledged.

“Unfortunately, not all parents are that discerning about what their children might buy,” said Robert Lindsey, head of sales and marketing for the U.S. unit of Japan’s Capcom, which sells fighting games to Sony and Nintendo.

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Study Finds Internet Addicts Often Have Other Disorders (CNN, 980602)

People who seem addicted to the Internet often show a bumper crop of psychiatric disorders like manic-depression, and treating those other conditions might help them rein in their urge to be online, a study suggests.

On average, Internet “addicts” in the study reported having five psychiatric disorders at some point in their lives, a finding that “just blew me away,” said psychiatrist Nathan Shapira of the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

It’s unclear whether the Internet problem should be considered a disorder or just a symptom of something else, or whether certain disorders promote the excessive online use, he said.

Shapira was scheduled to present the study at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in Toronto today.

He and colleagues studied 14 people who’d spent so much time online that they were facing problems like broken relationships, job loss and dropping out of school.

One 31-year-old man was online more than 100 hours a week, ignoring family and friends and stopping only to sleep. A 21-year-old man flunked out of college after he stopped going to class. When he disappeared for a week, campus police found him in the university computer lab, where he’d spent seven days straight online.

The study participants, whose average age was 35, were interviewed for three to five hours with standard questions to look for psychiatric disorders.

Being hooked on the Internet is not a recognized disorder. But Shapira said the excessive online use by the study participants would qualify as a disorder of impulse control, in the same category as kleptomania or compulsive shopping. In fact, he suggested the Internet problem be called “Internetomania” or “Netomania,” rather than an addiction.

But the striking thing, Shapira said, was the other psychiatric problems that turned up:

— Nine of the 14 had manic-depression at the time of the interview, and 11 had it at some point in their lives.

— Half had an anxiety disorder such as “social phobia,” which is a persisting and unreasonable fear of being embarrassed in public, at the time of the interview.

— Three suffered from bulimia or binge eating, and six had an eating disorder at some time in their lives.

— Four had conditions involving uncontrollable bursts of anger or buying sprees, and half reported such impulse-control conditions during their lives.

— Eight had abused alcohol or some other substance at some time in their lives.

The participants said medications for some of these conditions helped them gain control over Internet use. That happened nine of the 14 times they tried mood-stabilizing medications and four of 11 times they tried antidepressants.

They still used the Internet too much, Shapira said, but “the difference between three days straight online and spending two to four hours a day ... is an important move in the right direction.”

Kimberly Young, a University of Pittsburgh psychologist, said she has found a similar pattern of prior psychiatric problems in most people hooked on the Internet. Some people who’d abused alcohol or other substances told her they were using the Internet as a safer substitute addiction.

But she said many people with no prior sign of psychiatric trouble have gotten hooked on the Internet too.

They may be dealing with other life circumstances like stale marriages or job burnout, she said.

======================================

‘Family hour’ slimier TV watchdog reports (Washington Times, 990907)

The “family hour,” once a safe harbor for family television viewing, has become more polluted than ever, a TV watchdog group says.

“In the relatively short span of two seasons, the family hour has become dramatically more foul-mouthed, sex-saturated and violent,” said L. Brent Bozell III, chairman of the Parents Television Council (PTC), which on Sept. 1 released a study of network TV programs that air between 8 and 9 p.m.

“And the worst is yet to come,” Mr. Bozell said.

The 1999 season’s family-hour shows “will break down all historical broadcast standards,” he said, citing as particularly “raunchy” Fox’s “Manchester Prep,” UPN’s “WWF Smackdown!” and CBS’ “Ladies Man.”

Mr. Bozell called Fox Broadcasting Co. “the broadcast TV sleaze-leader” because every one of its family-hour shows contains objectionable material, with an average of 11 offensive elements each hour.

Officials from Fox, which airs “That ‘70s Show” and “reality” programs such as “The World’s Wildest Police Videos” during the family hour, were unavailable for comment last week.

The PTC study, “The Family Hour: Worse Than Ever and Headed for New Lows,” reviewed family-hour shows on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, UPN and WB in May. Some 60 programs over 45 hours were analyzed.

The study said that since 1997:

* Overall objectionable material increased by 75%.

* References to sex increased by 77%; 68% of family-hour shows have sexual content.

* Violent content doubled from an average of less than one instance per hour to 1.62 instances per hour.

* Foul language increased by 58%, with the most curse words heard on UPN. The PTC study said it did not count “hell,” “damn” or “butt” in its tally because they are now considered mild profanity. Instead, it counted only vulgarities referring to body parts, parentage and sex acts.

The PTC study said CBS had the least amount of offensive material overall, although it had the highest amount of family-hour violence.

CBS, home of the popular “Touched by an Angel,” was recently ranked the top ratings network by Nielsen Media Research.

ABC used to have the most sexual references, the PTC said, but now has an average of 3.47 references an hour — less than the overall average.

NBC, which airs “The Pretender” in the family hour, used to have the most overall offensive material, but has now dropped to second place, the study said.

In January, NBC Entertainment President Scott Sassa made headlines when he said his network would do more shows with traditional two-parent families and tone down the sexual antics.

However, the PTC study found that NBC was second-highest in sexual content, with an average of more than six references an hour.

Network TV is struggling to retain its viewers, TV critics say. Networks want to appeal to younger audiences, ages 18 to 39, for advertisers, without alienating their veteran over-40 viewers.

But they have come under increasing criticism for their program content. In July, they were denounced by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for not having enough black leading characters on their shows.

The PTC study says TV networks should “reinstate” the family hour, advertisers should shun shows that are “lewd and crude,” and parents should lobby for wholesome family-hour shows.

The ratings system and V-chip technology are fairly useless tools for parents, Mr. Bozell added. “Nothing gets a TV-M” for mature audiences, except the movie “Schindler’s List” and Howard Stern, he said.

==============================

Do Music and Movies Corrupt U.S. Kids? (Foxnews, 020328)

NEW YORK — From Britney Spears’ sexy gyrations to Marilyn Manson’s violent lyrics, American kids contend with a barrage of explicit images every day.

But should children be protected from such sensory assaults? And if so, who has that responsibility?

Many artists say that burden lies with parents. Others believe entertainment industry executives should more strictly police their products. Most experts say the responsibility must be shared.

In an hour-long Fox television network special to air on Thursday night (9 p.m. EST), host Bill O’Reilly will talk to a wide range of entertainment industry figures in an effort to answer some of those questions. Among his guests are members of the ICP (Insane Clown Posse), Marilyn Manson, Hollywood exec Jack Valenti and child psychologists.

On the one side are those who say children have impressionable minds and are bound to pick up on the sexual and violent imagery in today’s entertainment.

“Put a piece of Play-Doh on a table and it picks up everything. Kids are Play-Doh,” said Josephson, founder of the California-based Josephson Institute of Ethics. “They don’t even know what they’ve picked up.”

And there is plenty of questionable material for kids to pick up on in today’s movies and music, according to Josephson and others. A recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs in Washington, D.C., showed the 50 top-grossing films in 1998 and 2000 averaged seven scenes of sexual material, and 15 violent scenes per film.

But the most violent movies of 2000 included many more violent scenes, the study said. The Patriot had 159 violent scenes, Gladiator had 110 and Mission Impossible II had 108.

Movies are only part of the problem, activists say. The Internet, radio and music are filled with explicit references to guns, murder, suicide and sex. “It’s not only one influence. It’s a whole cultural thing,” said Josephson. “It’s the combination of things, from Temptation Island to Fear Factor.”

But members of bands like ICP don’t think they negatively influence their teen-age fans.

“We’re entertainers,” ICP member Shaggy said in response to accusations his group’s lyrics are overly violent. Bandmate “Violent J” added, “I don’t know what’s entertaining about it. But I’ll bring you to a concert and show you everyone singing along.”

“If those two nerds at Columbine would have had clown makeup on [like me] ... I wouldn’t have felt bad about it at all, because I honestly believe ... even if they were our biggest fans, people are insane,” said Violent J. “People are on their own.”

Shock rocker Marilyn Manson does take some responsibility for his work, but said the problem is a larger cultural phenomenon.

In one of his songs, he utters the morbid lyrics, “You’ll understand when I’m dead.” Couldn’t such glorification of death encourage kids to commit acts of violence or to harm themselves?

“I think that that’s a reflection of television in general. If you die and enough people are watching, then you become a martyr,” said Manson. “When you have things like Columbine and you have these kids that are angry and they have something to say and no one’s listening, the media sends a message that if you do something loud enough and it gets our attention, then you will be famous for it.”

Of course, some explicit albums are marked with a warning, just as Hollywood rates its films. But filmmakers have been accused of marketing even R-rated films to kids under 17.

“There were some movies, frankly, that I wouldn’t defend if my life and career depended on it,” said Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association. “But for the most part, responsible producers are really trying now, not to deliberately target children.”

But Fox News spoke to several teens under 17 who, without supervision, went to see American Pie 2, a film full of sexual references and jokes about drinking. Valenti admitted under-aged audiences can be a problem for the movie industry, but said it’s ultimately the parents’ responsibility to monitor their own children.

“There’s a lot of stuff out here in this country that parents have to make judgements about, what they want [their children] to read, to see, to hear, “ said Valenti. “There’s a lot of responsibility on the parents.”

So what are concerned mothers and fathers to do? Experts say protecting kids from these images is nearly impossible today.

“To be a really responsible parent today, you would have to be fighting with your child from the moment he or she got up in the morning to the moment he or she went to bed at night,” said Susan Linn, a psychologist with the Harvard Medical School.

==============================

Murder, Inc. Changed Names (National Review Online, 031208)

You’ll be pleased to know that Murder, Inc., the rap-record company, has changed its name — to, simply, “The Inc.” The company’s founder told a press conference, “People have been focused on the negative energy of the word ‘murder.’” You don’t say? “Negative energy”? And Russell Simmons, the hip-hop mogul, said the name change was necessary to “get you all off [the company’s] a**.” “You all” meant fuddy-duddies who might have been focusing on the negative energy of the word “murder.”

Me, I sort of liked the original name — by their names, you should know them. A company that produces a product that routinely celebrates murder, rape, and other crimes should have a forthright name. Truth in advertising, and all that.

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Italians Probe Heavy-Metal Satanist Drug Killings (FN, 040609)

ROME — A 19-year-old girl is stabbed to death — allegedly by a group of young Satanists who thought she personified the Virgin Mary. Her 16-year-old companion, no longer considered a reliable sect member, is killed and buried alongside her.

The discovery last week of the two victims’ burial place has sparked an investigation into a metal band scene in Milan and its possible links to Satan worshippers, according to details that emerged Tuesday.

The disappearance of Chiara Marino and Fabio Tollis in 1998 had remained a mystery until earlier this year, when one of the people later accused of the murders began to cooperate with authorities.

Prosecutors now suspect an occult sect carried out the killings in a drug-fueled ritual, said Francesca Cramis, lawyer for one of the four people arrested in the case.

Its members belonged to a heavy metal band, “Beasts of Satan,” and frequented a heavy metal bar in Milan called “Midnight,” said Cramis, speaking by telephone with The Associated Press.

Marino was close to the group, and investigators found her room decorated with black drapes, candles and a fake skull.

In January 1998, members of the sect took Marino and Tollis to woods near Somma Lombardo, northwest of Milan and killed them in an apparent Satanic ritual, investigators say.

According to police, they had already tried — and failed — to kill the two by burning them alive in a car on New Year’s Eve, said Cramis.

One of those arrested was Andrea Volpe, the former boyfriend of a third victim, Mariangela Pezzotta, buried alive after being shot in January.

It was the probe of her murder that led authorities to the buried remains of Tollis and Marino.

Prosecutors declined to talk with reporters Tuesday.

“Leave us to work — this probe is delicate and we need to proceed with a lot of caution,” Prosecutor Antonio Pizzi said.

Authorities are investigating whether the killers are part of a wider network of Satanists and were taking orders when they killed and offered up their victims.

Oreste Benzi, a priest who works to rehabilitate Satanists, estimates that these worshippers of the occult number around 600,000 in Italy.

“Satanists and those belonging to the occult are often unsuspected people and their goal is morally and psychologically destroy whoever works against them,” Benzi told the Vatican’s missionary news service Fides. “Often it is the most defenseless people who fall into the net of the sect,” he said.

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No Kid Rock at youth concert (WorldNetDaily, 050112)

Committee backs off plan to feature vulgar rapper after GOP outrage

Kid Rock, the vulgar rock-rapper who initially had been lined up to headline the youth concert next week as part of the inauguration festivities for President Bush, will not be apppearing after all.

“He’s not performing,” a spokesman for the Presidential Inauguration Committee confirmed for WND.

No further information about the cancellation of Kid Rock was available at press time.

Word that the rapper will not join JoJo and Hilary Duff as performers at the Jan. 18 concert, which will be hosted by Bush twins Barbara and Jenna, comes after WorldNetDaily and other outlets publicized the fact that the committee was planning to feature Kid Rock, which caused several pro-family organizations to ask their supporters to protest his appearance.

As WorldNetDaily reported, the Detroit-based rapper, who dedicated his first album to songs about oral sex and who was voted the Sluttiest Male Celebrity at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, has a history of vulgar lyrics.

Even so, Kid Rock, aka Robert James Ritchie, has been known to attend Republican events and was a supporter of Bush in last year’s presidential race. The New York Times reported that during a party he attended at the Republican National Convention last year, Kid Rock noted that if he were president he would never get caught having sex in the Oval Office, but would instead install cameras in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Kid Rock’s first album, “Grit Sandwiches for Breakfast,” fixates on oral sex, including one song, “Yo Da Lin In The Valley,” that describes the lyricist’s exploits with multiple women in detail. Another similar tune is “Wax the Booty.”

Also featured on his 1990 debut album is “Pimp of the Nation,” which ironically takes a swipe at Bush’s mother. The lyrics include:

Pimp of the Nation, I could be it

As a matter of a fact, I foresee it

But only pimpin’ hoes with the big tush

While you be left pimpin’ Barbara Bush

Some of Kid Rock’s songs include the F-word in their title, such as “F–- U Blind” and “F–- Off.”

The performer’s lyrics often center on the recreational nature of sex and speak of women as mere playthings.

According to an online bio, “Kid Rock is noted for his use of adult film stars when he performs (nude when he can get away with it), as Kobe Tai and Jenna Jameson have danced on stage while Kid does his thing.”

After reading some of Kid Rock’s lyrics, Randy Thomasson, president of Campaign for Children and Families, was outraged the rapper would be a part of the president’s festivities.

“I just read Kid Rock’s sexually explicit lyrics and feel ashamed and dirty for even looking at his songs,” he told WND. “If this sex-crazed animal, whose favorite word is the F-word, is allowed to sing at Bush’s inauguration this will send a clear message to pro-family Americans that the Republican Party has taken them for a ride and ditched them in the gutter.”

Besides Thomasson’s group, other pro-family organizations, including Concerned Women for America and the American Family Association, decried the planned appearance of Kid Rock and asked supporters to express their outrage to the inauguration committee. AFA sent an e-mail to 2.5 million supporters asking them to take action.

After initial publicity about the Kid Rock performance, the committee backpedaled on the issue, saying the vulgar entertainer was “not confirmed” to appear at the Bush youth concert.

AFA Chairman Don Wildmon told AgapePress he was frustrated after trying for several days to get a straight answer out of the committee about Kid Rock.

“All you have to say is yes, he’s is going to be here; no, he’s not going to be here,” he said. “But they refuse to do that – which leads me to think that they have the man signed up [and] ready to come, but they’re afraid of the backlash and they’re waiting to see what’s going to happen.”

White House spokesman Tim Goeglein said yesterday that while he could not speak for the inauguration committee, “Based on the [Kid Rock] lyrics that I have been told about ... I can tell you that the president would never endorse such lyrics and would never condone them.”

According to a Scripps-Howard report today, daughter Barbara helped arrange for JoJo and Hilary Duff to entertain, and “is still working on Kid Rock.”

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MTV’s Explicit Spring Break Programming and What To Do About It (Christian Post, 050322)

MTV Programming has gone from “bad to worse” with “endless drinking parties and relentless sexual stimulation,” and this year promises to be no different, states Teen Mania Ministries.

“For years, MTV has filled TV sets across America with a relentless stream of sex, violence and profanity. Music videos have gone from bad to worse, teetering on the edge of pornography, while reality shows hold nothing back with new dating games and cameras that follow young couples in to the bedroom,” states TMM.

The Parent Television Council analyzed MTV’s Spring Break 2004 coverage and found “eye opening” statistics, according to Teen Mania. In 171 hours of MTV programming there were 3,056 depictions of sexual dancing, gesturing, and various forms of nudity, 1,548 sexual scenes, and 2,881 verbal sexual references. Every hour, there are an average of 9 sexual scenes, 18 sexual depictions, and 17 references to sex every hour.

MTV tells its potential advertisers, “Young adults 15-17 are excited consumers and extremely impressionable. Now is the time to influence their choices.” MTV is viewed an average of 6 hours a week by 73% of boys and 78% of girls ages 12 to 19.

Glenn Murdock, Spokesperson of Youth Specialties, says “It’s as if culture has abandoned [kids], turning them into consumers rather than people. MTV, television, movies, etc have left them with not much in terms of role model.”

“That’s right, MTV is pulling out all the stops… making sure no one walks away empty handed. So, grab your bikinis, your sun tan lotion and your wildest dreams because this year Cancun is being transformed to an oasis of fantasy as we grant your biggest wishes and make your dreams a reality. This is MTV’s Spring Break 2005.” (MTV.com)

“You don’t need a plane ticket to join the endless drinking parties and the relentless sexual stimulation in Cancun this spring break. Thanks to MTV, young children and teens can watch it right in their living room,” states Teen Mania Ministries.

According to Dr. Jane Brown, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “If you believe Sesame Street taught your four-year-old something, then you better believe MTV is teaching your 14-year-old something, because the influence doesn’t stop when we come to a certain age.”

Research proves that MTV does influence the attitudes and perceptions of its viewers. After watching MTV for only one hour, a group of seventh and ninth graders were more likely to approve of premarital sex than before watching.

NNYM places MTV’s topmost harm on their explicit content or “loose attitude towards sex.” Doug Clark, Director of Field Ministries of National Network of Youth Ministries, who has been working with teenagers for thirty years, said.

“MTV does an incredible job of communicating to this generation but the overwhelming majority of what they communicate is harmful to the Christian faith,” he added.

Clark also believes that this generation should be taught how to think critically as there is “not a thing that you watch on TV that isn’t trying to teach you something.” Because “every bit of media has some kind of a message to it,” “it’s very important that we teach our young people how to think critically to something they see and be able to identify what God says about that.”

He also said that many parents “choose not to know, or they just don’t want to fight the battle with your kids,” placing the responsibility into the hands of the youth, who are being subjected to the culture.

However, Matt Smith, Webmaster of TeenLife with 5 years of experience in youth ministries places the responsibility into the hands of parents and Christians to “do something about it.”

“We’re not at the mercy of MTV. We’re the ones who watch those shows and those shows get paid for their advertising... We don’t have to lose,” he said, and urged parents and others to respond to MTV.

He went on the MTV’s the Real World New Orleans in 2000-01 and in the MTV’s Road Rules Challenge last year, to bring some “goodness” to the show.

Smith says, “MTV’s spring break programming is just short of soft-core porn.” However, like the crackdown on the tobacco industry and the fast food industry, he believes the next wave will be on the media. “There is a certain responsibility that the media has.” They cannot just “abuse [their] viewers” for money.

MTV’s Spring Break 2005 programs began Friday, March 18.

==============================

MTV keeps on rockin’ (Townhall.com, 050318)

Rebecca Hagelin

This study is proof positive that there is an element of Hollywood deliberately attempting to poison the minds of children. The ultimate insult is that their method has parents pay them to do it.

This astounding statement is one that every parent, and anyone concerned about our culture and its affect on children, must investigate.

Brent Bozell spoke these words over lunch as we discussed a recent study of programming content on MTV conducted by his organization, the Parents Television Council.

In case you’re not familiar with Brent, in addition to his work with PTC, he’s also the president of the Media Research Center and the nation’s leading expert on all things media. The author of one of the most important works on the media today, Weapons of Mass Distortion, Bozell is the eyes and ears for decent parents everywhere who just might not be able to follow every egregious action of an entertainment industry that is out of control.

First, a warning: The descriptions of the MTV programming described in Bozell’s study and this article are very graphic — and very real. They are not for the faint of heart. But if you have a teen, and pay for cable television access in your home, you must read the report.

Why? Because, as stated in the study, MTV is the most recognized network among young adults ages 12 to 34, according to Nielsen Media Research. It is watched by 73% of boys and 78% of girls ages 12 to 19. Boys watch for an average of 6.6 hours per week and girls watch for an average of 6.2 hours per week.

Rest assured, if you don’t have a block on your cable television, chances are, your kids are watching MTV. And if you don’t have an understanding with other parents when your kids are in their homes, chances are, your kids are watching there.

One of the most alarming findings in the amazing Parents Television Council study of MTV’s Spring Break programming (March 20-27, 2004):

In 171 hours of MTV programming, PTC analysts found 1,548 sexual scenes containing 3,056 depictions of sex or various forms of nudity and 2,881 verbal sexual references. That means that children watching MTV are viewing an average of 9 sexual scenes per hour with approximately 18 sexual depictions and 17 instances of sexual dialogue or innuendo. To put this in perspective, consider that in its last study of sex on primetime network television, the PTC found an average of only 5.8 instances of sexual content during the 10 o’clock hour — when only adults are watching.

For the strong of stomach who want to know more about what comes on in the afternoon just as tweens and teens are getting off the school bus and turning on the tube in America’s largely unsupervised homes, here’s just one example:

One Bad Trip 3/20/04 2:00 p.m.

Human-sundae eating competition: Three guys lie on stage; whipped cream is placed on their legs and chests. The three girls each straddle a guy and lick the whipped cream off.

Nate: She’s eating whipped cream off some dude’s [bleeped f—ing’] chest right now.

Nate: If she goes anywhere near his junk, she is so wrong.

Next, the girls switch places and have whipped cream placed all over them, including a cherry on each breast. Guys straddle them and lick the whipped cream off. The camera zooms in close.

Nate: Some dude is about to eat [bleeped s—t’] all over her body.

Melissa, in a voiceover: It’s a little bit strange having some random guy lick whipped cream off of me.

Then there’s the example of the standard MTV music content:

Pete Pablo Freak-a-Leak

How u like it, daddy (the way she do it from the front)?

How u like it, daddy (the way she do it from the back)?

How u like it, daddy (then bring it down like that)?

And she know why she came here

And she know where clothes suppose to be (off and over there)

[Bleeped Sniff a lil’ coke, take a lil’ X, smoke a lil’ weed,’] drink a lil’ bit

I need a girl I could freak with

And wanna try [bleeped s—t’] and ain’t scared of a big [bleeped d—k’]

And love to get her [bleeped p—y’] licked by another [bleeped b—h’]

Cause I ain’t drunk enough to do that [bleeped s—t’]

I’ve previously written about how MTV seeks to manipulate America’s children and how broadcast networks are targeting America’s youth. Just thought you might want to know it ain’t getting’ any better.

And in case you didn’t realize it, MTV is owned by Viacom, the same company that owns CBS (of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and Rathergate fame.) Surprised?

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Video Games—The New ‘Playgrounds of the Self?’ (Christian Post, 050812)

Just a couple of years ago, I was talking to a group of college students—mostly young men—about pressures, temptations, and challenges that come with living in our postmodern world. Predictably, many of these students mentioned challenges related to technology, such as the availability of internet pornography. What took me by surprise was their near-unanimous judgment that video games represent a persistent pattern of temptation they often find very hard to resist.

Pressing this issue a bit further, I asked the students why they identified video games as such a persistent challenge in their personal lives. They made their point clear by indicating just how many hours they and their friends often spend on video games—and just how difficult it is to maintain a clear focus between the real and the virtual while deeply engaged in gaming.

Christine Rosen, Resident Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, addresses this phenomenon in a fascinating essay entitled “Playgrounds of the Self,” published in the most recent edition of The New Atlantis. Rosen, an insightful observer of the culture, provides an absolutely fascinating glimpse into the reality of video gaming in our times.

First, Rosen dismisses many of the stereotypical perceptions held by those who look at video games from a distance. Yes, the vast majority of adolescent males are engaged in some form of video gaming. Nevertheless, she cites studies that indicate that the average age of a video gamer in America is thirty. Half of all Americans now play video games, and Rosen indicates that over 90% of American kids from age two to age seventeen are regulars. The Entertainment Software Association [ESA], the industry’s trade group, reports that the average adult woman gamer plays 7.4 hours per week and the average adult man gamer plays 7.6 hours. If anything, research indicates that those figures may be very low.

Douglas Lowenstein, the ESA president, recently reported that almost 100% of gamers between ages twelve and seventeen have been playing since age two. On average, these gamers have been playing for 9.5 years and gamers over the age of eighteen average twelve years of play.

Obviously, this represents a significant share of the consumer market. Rosen reports that the gaming industry “is poised to challenge the financial might of both the music and movie industries.” With the development of mobile gaming and revenue from gaming on the internet, “the video game industry likely will surpass the movie industry in the near future.” As Rosen summarizes, “Video games are now a permanent part of mainstream culture, one to which people devote a considerable amount of time.”

Technological advances explain why the video game industry has exploded in popularity in recent years. Today’s video games can be traced back to the now-quaint technologies of the pinball machine and games at amusement parks. But shooting arcades and pinball machines have given way to the incredibly sophisticated high-tech games that now dominate the industry. In the last quarter-century, the technology has leaped from Atari’s Video Computer System and “Pong” to today’s highly sophisticated multi-player and internet-based games. As Rosen summarizes: “In under a century, gaming has moved from the midway, to the tavern, to the mall, and into the home—where it has taken up permanent residence.”

What makes these games so popular? For some, it is the thrill of competition, racing, shooting, escaping, and the attraction of the games’ storylines. There are games of virtually every type, ranging from war games and sports games to “adult-oriented” video games rated “M” for mature audiences only.

There is more to come—Microsoft is soon to release a new version of its “Xbox” that founder Bill Gates envisions as a platform for comprehensive family entertainment and media. As Rosen suggests, the new Xbox may be “the Trojan Horse that will eventually deliver access to more than video games in the American living room.”

Interestingly, Rosen begins her article by considering these games as an experiment in self-invention. Many of these new games involve deeply intensive role-playing and the creation of artificial selves. Given the vast number of hours many persons commit to playing these games, do they even know who they are anymore? Rosen notes: “We have created video games, the new playgrounds of the self. And while we worry, with good reason, about having our identities stolen by others, we ignore the great irony of our own mass identity theft—our own high-tech ways of inventing and reinventing the protean self, wherein the line between reality and virtually reality ultimately erodes and disappears.”

Parents are often the first to notice the effect of video games. Several years ago, military analyst David Grossman argued that video games involving shooting had turned American adolescent males into excellent marksmen—demonstrating incredible eye-hand coordination. The physiology of video gaming is also of significant interest. After all, the endorphins released in the process of intense video gaming are the same chemicals released in the process of panic or sexual activity. As is now well known, these hormone releases can become addictive.

Dr. Maress Hecht Orzack, Director of the Computer Addiction Study Center and Clinical Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School argues, “These games are meant to be addicting.” Orzack blames parents for allowing their children to develop such addictions. “When the grades go down, that’s when the parents call me . . . . They use these as electronic babysitters, and that’s not conducive to good parenting.” Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard once described his brief but intensive experience with the game “Snood,” as a form of addiction. “I also began to understand for the first time what an addiction is . . . . It’s a desperate need to simplify. An addiction is a gravitation towards anything that plausibly mimics life while being less complicated than life.”

The distinction between real life and video reality is often the most urgent concern. Many of the most popular video games—especially those involving multiple players over the internet—require participants to create alternative selves and completely new identities. These games include “MMORPGs” [Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games] that can involve hundreds of people playing out their fantasies through invented identities.

As Christine Rosen sees it, “Improved hand-eye coordination is not the reason most people play video games. It is the opportunity to be someone else—someone else with limitless powers and absolute control.” Obviously, this can become deeply problematic.

One research study indicates that a sizable percentage of online players change genders as they invent new identities. As Howard Rheingold posed the issue in The Virtual Community: “What kind of multiple distributed system do I become when I live part of the day as a teenage girl in a chatroom, part of the day as a serious professional in a web conference, part of the day slaying enemies as Zaxxon, the steel-eyed assassin of an online gaming tribe?”

Rosen also provides a glimpse into the world of “Christian game makers” who “are wary of role-playing games that promote any form of spiritual or moral relativism.” Rosen cites Jonathan Dee who noted in The New York Times Magazine, “The Christian gamers’ position is that, while you may fight the Devil and lose, you may not fight as the Devil.”

Not all video gamers become addicted to violent games, and many stay away from the intense role-playing and fantasy identities. Nevertheless, Rosen raises the question of balance, authenticity, and reality in individual lives. She explains: “In previous eras, games were supposed to provide more than mere play; they were supposed to improve us morally or physically. The conceit of contemporary times is that games improve our intelligence, and that they do this so well that we ought to integrate them into more spheres—the classroom, the boardroom, the playground—as replacements for less advanced ways of learning. Our embrace of video games is yet another chapter in the ongoing story of technology-as-liberation.”

Are children and teenagers who spend hours playing video games missing something? There is considerable evidence that many of these children and adolescents simply lack the sustained experience of playing games that require teamwork, socialization, and actual conversations with real—rather than invented—persons. Furthermore, the vast majority of these games are played inside while the participants stare at a screen while holding electronic gadgetry.

Consider Rosen’s analysis: “Video game fantasies, although graphic and sophisticated, are also sanitized in a way that real play is not. Video games carry no real risk of physical harm or personal embarrassment, as in real games and real sports. When a child plays outdoors, he might at least risk skinning a knee; when a child plays soccer on a team, she might get nervous as she stands on the field waiting for the opening whistle or embarrassed when she makes a mistake. But this is not the case of video games. It is perhaps telling that the biggest risk to gamers are ailments associated with modern adult work: carpal tunnel syndrome and eyestrain.”

The games of today will surely be replaced with the games of tomorrow, but Christine Rosen has raised some of the most significant issues that should frame our thinking about what it means to be human, what it means to play, and how we should prioritize our lives. Beyond this, she also reminds us of the distinction between the real and the imagined—and of the importance of knowing the difference.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Obscene ‘reality’ (Washington Times, 050815)

It’s daytime in the summer, and what are your children watching?

The odds are that it’s MTV, cable’s raunchiest magnet for the out-of-school crowd. Nielsen experts say MTV is watched by 73% of boys and 78% of girls aged 12 to 19, and if they’ve got it on during the day, the younger ones in the house are probably checking it out, too.

TV Week reports that television viewership of broadcast and cable shows is up this summer, and some networks aggressively plan to catch (and then capture) viewers during the summer months. MTV Group executive Brian Graden told TV Week that they focus hard on their daytime and late-night programming because “our audiences are home in a way they’re not during the school year.”

That attracts advertisers selling to youngsters, too, everyone from Coke to Pepsi to Hershey to Dentyne gum. MTV tells them “Young adults 15-17 are excited consumers and extremely impressionable. Now is the time to influence their choices.”

MTV’s summer schedule includes daytime repeats every day of their nighttime reality shows that usually debut in “The 10 Spot” at 10 p.m. eastern time, especially “The Real World: Austin.” But even if parents were home, they wouldn’t be helped by MTV, or those shameless cable-industry lackeys who tell you to trust the V-chip. MTV has dropped its content indicators this summer, meaning there is no L for language and no S for sexual material. Thus the V-chip wouldn’t block a thing when “Austin” starts with the “cast” in a hot tub with shot glasses with one woman toasting, “Here’s to having a huge seven-person orgy.” It wouldn’t help with the woman-on-woman kissing session that follows. According to the MTV schedule for late July, MTV was planning to air “Austin” episodes at least 19 times in a week.

There’s also at least 19 repeats of “The ‘70s House,” where clueless young people born in the mid-1980s live together in a house in a completely polyester ‘70s bubble (and complain about the “tight and skimpy threads they’ve had to wear since being tossed into the totally shagadelic ‘70s.”) Plus at least 16 re-airings a week of “Laguna Beach,” a “reality” version of “The O.C.,” with rich California 18-year-olds having a spicy last summer at home. The group’s trip to Cabo San Lucas includes one male offering the obligatory MTV sentence: “Let’s just have a big orgy. Are you guys down? Now that we’re in Cabo, let’s just [bleep].”

MTV boasts about its bad-behavior shows. On one of their Web features touting the nastiest new video games, it raves over the Xbox game “Fable” with the words: “Take the moral low-road and watch your character grow horns as you [bleep] loudly in public, cheat, steal, brawl, guzzle beer in the local taverns until you throw up all over yourself. In other words, it’s like a ‘Real World’ highlight reel, baby.”

Over the summer, one brave researcher for the Parents Television Council studied the foul language on the original airings of MTV “reality” shows from January to mid-July. In 136 shows adding up to 71 hours, there were 938 bleeped curse words (the big offenders, especially the F-bomb), and 542 non-bleeped curse words (such as “a—,” “da—” and “he—.”). Do the math. There’s approximately one instance of foul language every three minutes. None of that onslaught would be caught by your supposedly foolproof V-chip, since MTV is skipping out on identifying its own filth.

Why would you bury an audience in bleeped F-bombs? Why would you encourage it? Is it funny? (Three years ago, Time magazine said the bleeped language on “The Osbournes” show “wasn’t going to stay hilarious forever.”)

Or does it encourage the viewers to get annoyed with the bleeping and push the envelope further into the un-bleeped “real world” of profanity?

Here’s at least one reason. If you thought fantasy football was for geeks, how about fantasy “reality show” games? MTV.com has an online competition for you to pick the sleaziest reality-show contestant. You earn “fantasy points” from your character “each time a Cast Member says a curse word in which ‘bleeping’ or audio ‘dropping’ is required.” You also “earn” points toward a prize when your characters get naked (“blurring of the picture must occur”), for “hooking up/making out,” for getting into “a verbal or physical fight,” for cheating, and for bodily functions (defined as “Vomiting, . . . Burping, Snot-Rocketing, Peeing and Spitting”).

All this is one incredible innocence-nuking spectacle for the pre-teen audience. It’s not a great routine for the teenagers, either. A study in the journal Pediatrics found that heavy exposure to sexual content on TV related strongly to teenagers’ initiation of intercourse or their progression to more advanced sexual activities. MTV wants to take your boys and girls from “scoring” their shows at home to just plain “scoring.”

L. Brent Bozell III is the founder and president of the Parents Television Council and a nationally syndicated columnist.

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Terrifying ‘Teen Choice’ champions (townhall.com, 050819)

Brent Bozell

The annual “Teen Choice Awards” recently broadcast on Fox celebrated the winners of an online poll operated by Teen People magazine for 13- to 19-year-old voters. In between the incessant screaming of 13-year-old girls for every winner, presenter and commercial break came the award winners, and if this isn’t enough to send shivers down the spine of any parent, nothing will.

Start with “Choice Rap Artist,” which went unsurprisingly to white rap “artist” Eminem, who keeps on teasing and promising us he’s going to retire from his so-called musical career, something that couldn’t happen fast enough.

The “Choice Rap Track” went to his song “Mockingbird,” which is another pathetic example of Eminem using his young daughter as a prop to excuse his brand of ultra-violent raunch. In this song, he tells his daughter how much he loves her, but is too busy touring and ruining the upbringing of other people’s children to be home with her. Lest it seem too treacly and sweet, Eminem cracks at the end: “And if that mockingbird don’t sing and that ring don’t shine, I’m-a break that birdie’s neck / I’ll go back to the jeweler who sold it to ya and make him eat every carat / don’t f**k with Dad.”

At least Teen People didn’t give him an award for his hit “Ass Like That” and its sophisticated lyrics that were all over the radio, telling a girl that her rump “make my pee-pee go doing, doing, doing.”

Female pop sensation Gwen Stefani launched the show, dazzling the teen girls with items from what she maintained is her new fashion line, a torn top revealing a gold bikini layered over a tiger-print bra, and sequin-studded plaid boxers overflowing from the top of Stefani’s white shorts. How many girls will be imitating that bizarre style?

The TV shows that won awards seemingly were culled from the cultural compost. Fox’s “That ‘70s Show” won more awards for teen idol Ashton Kutcher. The show is set in the allegedly hip 1970s, and the show’s main recurring themes are sex and drugs, with the characters’ frequent use of marijuana treated as harmless fun. Which it is, when compared to other subject matter. Last year, an entire episode was devoted to the lead character masturbating in his girlfriend’s bathroom. Despite the adult matter, the show is aired at the beginning of the so-called “family hour” in order to attract the most children, which, obviously, it did, as evidenced by the Teen Choice Award.

Fox’s “The O.C.” won four awards, including “Choice Drama” and best actor and actress in a drama, another “family hour” show at 8 p.m. that specializes in mature themes. A few months ago, an episode featured an out-of-control teen party, with girls in tiny bikinis shown in clinches with boys, dirty dancing with them while the camera zeroed in on their gyrating buttocks. Other party highlights included heavy drinking from beer kegs and teenagers snorting cocaine off of a table in public. One of the lead characters walked by the coke users and cracked, “Looking good, man,” then he and his girlfriend retreated to her bedroom to engage in their private party antics, only to find a naked boy and two girls in her bed.

But the real take-the-cake “Teen Choice” winner was ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” which won for “Choice Breakout Show,” and actress Eva Longoria won for “Choice Breakout Actress.” Longoria, whose character’s affair with her teenaged gardener was apparently too slutty to earn an Emmy nomination (as three of her “Desperate” cast mates were nominated). But she was upstanding enough for the Teen Choice Awards.

When she accepted, Longoria expressed moral confusion: “I don’t know how I feel about teenagers watching us,” but lest you think she was attempting to draw some moral line, she added the joke, “but I did spend all season with a teenager.” Cue the supportive screaming audience.

Actress Jessica Alba evinced the same bubblegum brand of moral relativism when she wondered to USA Today how her cowgirl stripper from the ultra-violent and raunchy R-rated movie “Sin City” got her nominated for best movie actress in the action-adventure category. “If their parents took them, then fine,” she said, shrugging. “It was a very artistic movie.”

This is child pornography in reverse. Rather than raunchy imagery of innocent children being peddled to seedy adults, it is moral depravity being marketed to children by adults. Once upon a time, Hollywood had the common decency to build safe harbors around impressionable children. Today, the ground rules are reversed, and now it is that very sweet innocence that they are out to destroy.

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Permission for pleasure: Does everything we enjoy have to be good for us? (townhall.com, 051207)

by Jacob Sullum

Robot dogs and cloning are not the only developments anticipated in “Sleeper” that have come to pass. Near the beginning of Woody’s Allen’s 1973 science-fiction comedy, a doctor remarks that steak, cream pies, and deep-fried foods once “were thought to be unhealthy — precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.” We seem to hear similar news every month or so.

Our latest “Sleeper” moment came when researchers announced that drinkers are less prone to obesity than teetotalers. The idea that one holiday indulgence could help protect us from the consequences of another has understandable appeal this time of year. But the hope that the things we like are also good for us springs eternal in a society where many people are irrationally anxious about pursuing pleasure for its own sake.

How else are we to understand the reaction to a 2003 study that suggested eating dark chocolate can lower blood pressure? “You can sin with perhaps a little less bad feeling,” one physician told the Associated Press, as if nibbling a Godiva truffle should be up there on the tablets with perjury, theft and murder.

In the drinking study, published on Dec. 5 in BMC Public Health, two researchers analyzed data on 8,236 nonsmokers from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which includes direct measurement of body mass index (weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared). Current drinkers were 27% less likely than abstainers to be obese, defined as having a BMI of 30 or more.

That average conceals a more complicated picture: Although subjects who reported consumption of one or two drinks a day were substantially less likely to be obese than abstainers, those who said they had three drinks a day were about as likely to be obese, while those who said they had four or more drinks a day were substantially more likely to be obese. Since alcohol consumption was self-reported, the actual levels may be higher, but the trend of risk falling and then rising with the amount of drinking seems clear.

As one skeptic pointed out in a Health Day story about the study, this association is counterintuitive, since “alcohol is very energy-dense,” containing seven calories per gram, compared to nine for fat and four for protein and carbohydrates. Yet other studies, based on self-reported height and weight, have yielded similar results.

Alcohol per se may not make people thin. But if people have after-dinner drinks instead of fat-rich desserts, the upshot might be lower calorie intake. Or it could simply be that the sort of people who consume alcohol moderately also tend to consume food moderately, unlike people who drink to excess or who abstain because they’re afraid of losing control.

Fortunately for those who need an excuse to have a drink, the beneficial health effects of alcohol consumption go beyond the association with lower weight. Many studies have found that moderate drinking reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, for example, possibly through its impact on cholesterol.

Although alcohol can be at least partly redeemed, it seems tobacco has been irrevocably condemned. Explaining the World Health Organization’s new policy against hiring anyone who admits to using tobacco in any form, a WHO spokesman told The Associated Press: “With tobacco, there is no middle ground. It is black and white.”

From WHO’s perspective, then, the occasional cigar is indistinguishable from a pack-a-day cigarette habit, even though the hazards are vastly different. When you combine this blind botanical prejudice with health-above-all puritanism, you get the self-righteous intolerance displayed by the typical anti-smoking activist.

The rest of us are left to wonder whether everything we enjoy has to be good for us. Or could it be that we only enjoy what’s bad for us? Then again, maybe our enjoyment is what makes it bad. Put that in your pipe, but for heaven’s sake, don’t smoke it.

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The Next Temptation of the Christian Church (townhall.com, 060201)

by Mark Joseph (bio | archive | contact )

Recently, the latest installment in the Left Behind film series opened on 3,000 plus screens across the U.S, a notable opening that would have produced a tsunami of media interest had it occurred in theaters instead of church sanctuaries. But since it occurred outside of the mainstream of American cultural life in venues only accessible to some, the film’s content wasn’t debated on talk radio, featured on the cover of Time Magazine or discussed on All Things Considered, The O’Reilly Factor or Hardball. In pop culture terms, it was as if it had never happened.

In the wake of the success of The Passion of the Christ, it was only a matter of time before marketers seized on the idea of turning churches into first-run movie theaters. While some are heralding this as an innovative idea, it’s actually a rerun of a bad movie that once played in the music world.

Beginning in 1969, many devout Americans similarly pulled out of the music industry, forming a separatist musical genre which over time came to be known as Contemporary Christian Music or CCM for short. For the next 25 years or so, CCM became the place to go for artists who wanted to make expressions of faith. Artists who felt constrained by the demands of “secular” record labels that wanted them to keep religion out of their music often used CCM labels to express themselves spiritually and then returned to the “secular” labels when they wanted to make “secular” music. So it wasn’t uncommon to hear artists like Philip Bailey of Earth, Wind & Fire express his “secular” side on his album Chinese Wall hit the charts with a song like “Easy Lover,” and then turn around the very next year and make a “religious record” The Wonders Of His Love. Countless artists from Al Green to B.J. Thomas were forced by economic realities to play this game which was a byproduct of the separation of pop music into two industries: the secular and sacred.

Both sides appeared pleased with the arrangement. The religious got to express themselves without any market constraints that might have been imposed upon them by being a part of the “secular” industry and the “secular” side freed itself from the constraints that had been imposed by the demands of moralist consumers who tended to frown on music they deemed offensive.

Many executives who populated the music industry in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s were all too willing to have devout artists leave their industry and make their statements of faith in the cultural gulag of Christian rock, where they would be sentenced to cultural obscurity. It was the pop culture equivalent of being shipped off to Siberia and being put to work breaking up rocks, a tactic effectively used to shut up freedom-loving Russian intellectuals in the former Soviet Union.

What resulted was two decades of nearly unbroken absence of serious religious faith from the mainstream of pop music. But in the late 1990s, the picture began to change when many devout artists, tired of being bit players in pop culture, rebelled and began to leave the CCM industry in favor of mainstream labels. That great exodus produced a rush of rock bands like Switchfoot, P.O.D., Chevelle, Lifehouse, Creed, MxPx, Sufjan Stevens and others who insisted on being a part of the cultural mainstream and refused to disappear quietly into the religious subculture.

The current movement on the part of some religious film producers to abandon theaters and turn churches into movie houses is a move wrought with danger—for a number of reasons other than the uncomfortable prospect of finding popcorn in one’s seat in church come Sunday morning. For secular Americans who are annoyed by pop culture expressions of faith like The Passion Of The Christ, Bruce Almighty and The Chronicles of Narnia, such a retreat would be a dream come true for the current market pressures, which are being brought to bear on Hollywood by traditionalists, but would disappear as they flocked to their local churches for first-run movies. The absence of such market pressure would leave multiplexes free to run films that would cater almost exclusively to the cinematic interests of non-churchgoers, allowing Hollywood to create movies on two tracks: religious fare to be shown in churches and secular fare for theaters. The result would likely be religious films with no mainstream appeal and mainstream films that are offensive to churchgoers, with the latter getting all of the media and pop culture attention.

The producers of the Left Behind series were likely not thinking about such long term consequences, however. They simply wanted to get their movie seen by as many people as possible and were willing to take them any way they wanted to come—in theaters or churches. But driving devout Americans out of the public square and into churches to watch movies (American pop culture’s version of the Madras wherein important religious ideas are debated only in the hothouse of agreement among those who see eye-to-eye with no outside critical adjustments allowed) is ultimately detrimental to both the religious and the irreligious, since it shuts off dialogue and denies a shared cinematic experience. Instead, devout film producers will need to make better quality films and studios will need to give them the same theatrical distribution they were able to provide for such cinematic masterpieces as Dude Where’s My Car?, and The Pope Must Diet.

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Won’t You Please Help Me? The life and death of the Beatles. (National Review Online, 060406)

In his epic saga of the four lads from Liverpool, The Beatles: The Biography, Bob Spitz delivers a jarring reappraisal of the supposed glory days of the band that spearheaded the British Invasion. The Beatles’s earliest performances in the grimy clubs of Liverpool; their brutal drug and alcohol fueled gigs in Germany; the bedlam of Beatlemania; and the petty dismemberment of the most successful pop ensemble to that date are meticulously chronicled with unflinching candor. Whether intentional or not, Spitz has succeeded in deconstructing the official, blissful Beatles myth that was propagated by Paul, George, and Ringo in their meandering television pseudo-documentary, The Beatles Anthology (1995).

After hearing an upbeat interview with Spitz on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, I expected his book to indulge us with a joyful celebration of Beatlemania. Instead, the heroic Mop Top myth quickly disintegrates into an often dark and tragic morality play that begins with the dysfunctional family life of an angry teenager named John Lennon, whose eventual stardom led him to declare that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. The irony, of course, is that one is hard pressed to find a more apt illustration of Jesus’ saying “What would it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul?” than the John Lennon of Spitz’s biography. (As it turned out, Lennon’s fame also quite literally cost him his life when a deranged fan murdered him).

A Sad Man

Beatles fans know that the band’s founder was a restless and unconventional soul, that Lennon had a biting wit and predictably offered huge doses of sarcastic buffoonery to his audiences. Spitz highlights many of these colorful displays: torrents of profanity at German audiences; Nazi salutes from the balconies of hotels; and John’s famous, much-rehearsed quip in which he invited the British royalty to “rattle their jewelry” during a Royal Command Performance.

Spitz deftly takes us beyond these antics to lay bare a tortured soul that found no comfort in fame, no respite from his inner demons. While avoiding the pitfalls of playing the role of armchair psychologist, Spitz documents the traumas of young Lennon’s life that weighed him down with an often-debilitating melancholia. His father abandoned him when he was five; his mother was killed in a car accident when he was 18; he flunked out of art college; his best friend and idol, Stuart Sutcliffe, the bassist for the Hamburg version of the Beatles, died of a brain aneurysm.

The grown-up Lennon found little solace in his musical art; instead, this despondent artist acted out his pain in increasingly frequent verbal and physical confrontations with his closest friends and associates. When the Beatles finally bid good riddance to the deplorable conditions of their early gigs and began to live like royalty, Lennon’s alcoholism, drug abuse, and self-destructive tendencies became even more pronounced (many readers will understandably be stunned by the magnitude of his chronic drug dependency). The people who loved him the most — Cynthia, his long-suffering wife, whom he treated with humiliating contempt; and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ gay manager with whom John reportedly had a sexual encounter in Spain — were vilified, mocked, and abused. Lennon was also a miserable father who subjected his young son Julian to the same emotional deprivations that he had endured as a child.

How the Other Half Lived

The other half of the fabled Lennon and McCartney song-writing team seems to have been more immune to the vicissitudes of his life. While it is true that Paul came from a more stable home environment, he too suffered the trauma of a lost parent; his mother died of cancer when he was a teen. Yet Paul seemed to carry little emotional baggage into adulthood, or if he did, he was remarkably adept at concealing it. The Paul that emerges in Spitz’s account is an exceptionally intelligent young man; a brilliant and disciplined musician who was brimming with self-importance; the consummate entertainer and showman who thrived on being in the public eye.

Like the other Beatles, Paul was often overwhelmed with the virtual imprisonment that accompanied stardom. But unlike John, Paul enjoyed being a Beatle, and when the joy ride came to an end, he didn’t demolish his legacy with the same sort of vituperation and public lunacy as his partner. Spitz forces us to conclude that Lennon’s hostility towards the Beatles after their break-up was largely the result of his deep personal animosity towards Paul. Always jealous and suspicious of Paul, even when they were at their collaborative peak, Lennon bitterly resented the fact that after Brian Epstein’s untimely death, John’s band became Paul’s band. But given Lennon’s drug addiction, mental instability, artistic incoherence, and puerile behavior, it is hard to imagine any other scenario.

Paul introduced the Beatles’s lead guitarist, George Harrison, to the band. A solid musician who always stood in the long shadow of Lennon and McCartney, George seems to have been much closer to John in his cynicism about Beatlemania and the legions of shrieking girls who drowned out their performances. While he feasted on endless orgies of babes, booze, and drugs with the other Beatles, George looked to the East for spiritual enlightenment, convincing the other band members to embark on an ill-fated trip to study with the Maharishi. Despite the disappointment with his initial foray into Eastern spirituality, Harrison seems to have continued his introspective quest through his close association with Indian musicians,

Ringo Starr (born, Richard Starkey) became a Beatle when John, Paul, and George decided that their strikingly handsome and popular drummer, Pete Best, was an impediment to their success. Their manager unceremoniously fired Best; he was stunned that they weren’t man enough to deliver the news to his face, and he broke down in tears at the ruthlessness of this act of treachery. Ringo had no qualms about leaving his band and taking Best’s place. Most observers agreed that he was a talented musician who worked his own kind of ugly-duckling charm with the band members and audiences alike.

Disbanding the Band

The demise of the Beatles, recounted with mind-numbing detail in the closing chapters of the book, seems less surprising and more inevitable in Spitz’s reconstruction. In fact, given the perpetual conflict, chronic drug abuse, and chaos that engulfed the band, we can only wonder how they endured for so long. The Beatles were great songwriters and performers but had no aptitude for the business end of Beatlemania. As Spitz notes, they were the victims of a number of bungled business deals and scams that resulted from the shortcomings of their all-too-distracted manager, Brian Epstein. His grooming of the Beatles when he “discovered” them in the Cavern Club paved the way for unimaginable success. But Epstein’s bumbling through the terra incognita of celebrity of such magnitude was compromised by his own inner turmoil. A life-long homosexual (when such behavior was both scandalous and illegal), Epstein, like Lennon, fell into a downward, inward spiral just as the Beatles phenomenon had hit a dramatic crescendo. His own self-destructive and hedonistic behavior, which paralleled Lennon’s, culminated in death by a drug overdose at the age of 32. If only he had found the equivalent of a Yoko Ono to pull him back from the abyss.

The Beatles never recovered from their manager’s death. As Lennon later declared, when Brian died, “I knew we’d had it.” Their brilliant producer, George Martin, continued to work his magic in the studio with the band members (his magnificent production of Abbey Road is perhaps his greatest achievement), but he invested little emotional or spiritual capital in his personal relationship with them. He clearly admired them as musicians but not as people. In aggressively attempting to fill the gaping hole left by the loss of Brian, Paul only generated more strife among the band members. Critics panned his disastrous television project, Magical Mystery Tour, and another of his ill-fated schemes, the movie Let it Be, unwittingly became an embarrassing archive of the band’s demise. Even Paul admitted, years later, that he had crafted the “Beatles’ break-up on film.”

The disbanding of John, Paul, George, and Ringo comes as a relief by the time we finish Spitz’s narrative. He unblinkingly catalogues the drug-induced absurdity of their new commercial enterprises. The anarchy and corruption of their own record label, Apple — with its host of con artists, groupies, and gold-diggers (Spitz counts Yoko Ono among them), who fleeced the Beatles for untold sums of money — makes for painful reading. It is hard to imagine that the band would have been capable of even of a modicum of artistic achievement in such a Dionysian setting. The angry young man from Liverpool who founded the Beatles had “gained the world,” but in the process was quite literally losing his mind, not to mention his personal fortune. It really had come time for the lads to go their separate ways and to Let it Be.

— Timothy M. Thibodeau is professor of history at Nazareth College in Rochester, N.Y.

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Truth, Fiction, or Something in Between? The Meaning of Television (Mohler, 060515)

Media critic Neal Gabler [KH: liberal] has suggested that popular entertainment is turning the nation into a giant transcontinental soap opera. Individual citizens are creating “life movies” starring themselves, and the entertainment industry has become “a force so overwhelming that it has finally metastasized into life.”

Gabler’s assessment comes immediately to mind in light of the way that Hollywood and the entertainment industry are repackaging reality—even when dealing with issues as intimate as realities of family life and the institution of marriage.

Columnist Lee Siegel considers the meaning of television in his recent review of the HBO series, Big Love. “Culture events such as Big Love are to the media what the doings of a mysterious new family are to gossip in a small town,” Siegel explains. Thus, the appearance of the series—now under contract for a second season—provides a catalyst for many in the media to raise questions about marriage, polygamy, the Mormon movement, and a host of related issues. Nevertheless, sex and marriage are at the very center of the “gossip” about this series.

Siegel suggests a very interesting argument. In his view, the success of HBO’s various series, including Big Love, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under, can be explained by the fact that the network goes for stories from the margins of society. “Their weirdness both normalizes your own most unsettling impulses and gets your vicarious wheels turning,” Siegel asserts. “But the latter effect is stronger than the former.”

Looking at the history of the television medium, Siegel suggests that the older television programs “sought out the everyday and diversified it with the exceptional.” Now, the situation is reversed. Television now seeks “the ordinary in the extraordinary.” The Sopranos succeeds, he argues, because of “the simultaneity of the routine and the horrific.” The characters in the HBO dramas appear quite normal in many ways—dealing with the very normal complications of marriage, work, kids, and the larger world. Yet, when it comes to The Sopranos, these include “normal” people who kill for a living.

Lee Siegel’s central thesis is this: “Commercial society’s deepest aspiration, after all, is a synthesis of total instinctual gratification with the preservation of the social order.” Advertisers may have depended upon something like “subliminal seduction” in the past, but, in the current context “unconscious desire is as plainly visible on television as that iPod in your hand.”

Siegel’s essay appears in the May 22, 2006 edition of The New Republic. He is a keen observer of the culture at large, as well as an analyst of the television screen. When he looks at Big Love, he sees “a man ordering twenty more tablets of Viagra from the pharmacy on one phone, while on another phone, at the same time, he is exchanging pleasantries with one of his three wives, all of whom have him racing back and forth between their different beds in separate houses like a bull in June.”

Thus, Big Love takes its viewers “one giant step closer to the fusion of conscious and unconscious planes of existence so desperately sought by television and commerce.”

Now, Siegel’s analysis appears to be rooted in economic theory and at least a soft form of Marxist criticism. At the same time, his criticism appears to be mostly on-target, pointing to issues far beyond the economic—reaching into the most intimate spheres of life.

Big Love may deal with “issues,” like plural marriage, the future of the family, patriarchy, along with many others, but the real power of the series is its presentation of the bizarre as (at least partly) normal. Siegel calls this new television form “allegorical realism.” “Its extreme situations always verge on symbolic resonance, but they are too closely tied to familiar dialogue and context to acquire much abstract meaning.” In other words, the compelling power of the story, and the familiar structure of the dialogue, conspire to hide the truly bizarre nature of polygamy from view.

Siegel isn’t really interested in polygamy as a social movement. He accepts that there are tens of thousands of Americans living in polygamous relationships, but his major concern is the human drama in more existentialist terms.

“The question that Bill’s wives keep asking themselves is: are we here by choice or are we trapped? That is to say, how much are you willing to pay for financial security, for emotional safety, for romantic and sexual fulfillment?,” Siegel asks.

As most of America now knows, Big Love presents as polygamous husband, Bill Henrickson, living with his three wives and their children. In Siegel’s view, “The really absorbing quality of Big Love is that it can ask fundamental questions without constructing breaking points. The calm, ordinary course of a polygamist’s day is inherently combustible. You don’t need any splitting to see the seams.”

In one sense, Siegel agrees with Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, the creators of Big Love, when they claimed that their series offers an “ideal template to look at marriage and family.” To Siegel, this claim makes sense. It’s not so much about one man with three wives, as about every marriage seen in a new light.

Siegel argues that “a man with three wives magnifies into clear visibility the power dynamics—the jealousy, the subtle confusions inflicted on children, the protean relationship between sex and money—that lie invisible below the surface in most families. If the show is sometimes appalling in its spectacle of male domination and female subservience, then that is the homage it pays to truth.”

By presenting polygamy as entertainment, Big Love allows its creators to delve into controversial issues while humanizing their characters. The Henrickson clan is presented as wholesome and hardly exotic. Polygamy may be illegal, and the Mormon church may have banned it in 1890, but it still, in Siegel’s view, carries the aura of “a religiously sanctioned institution.” As he sees it, polygamy is “an eternal fantasy for most males between the ages of fifteen and eighty-five, from surfers and sculptors to surgeons. In other words, Big Love’s polygamy is a sacralized antinomianism, and institutionalized promiscuity, which may be another name for the American dream. No one wants to be curbed, but everyone wants to be right.”

Now Siegel is really onto something. The popularity of television dramas like Big Love must be rooted in the fact that they play into sexual fantasies while appearing to normalize the persons involved—thus allowing viewers to enjoy the dramas as entertainment, without taking responsibility to make judgments in moral terms.

Thus, Siegel’s point is in fundamental alignment with what the late Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business—that Americans are allowing themselves to be entertained into mindlessness.

While some critics complain that Big Love has made polygamy look boring, Siegel sees this as the very key to the success of the series. “Making polygamy look like fun would hardly calm the slightly more legitimate concern about using a despicable social practice for the purpose of entertainment,” he explains. “In fact, showing the dark side of gratification even as it allows viewers to gratify themselves vicariously is Big Love’s essential success. And this is the brilliant mechanism at the heart of HBO’s best shows.”

In the end, Siegel sees Big Love as “both the indictment of a commercialist ethos of gratification and the expression of it.” He can only wonder where this will lead: “As television grows less and less constrained in its imagination of the antinomian and the weird, you wonder where the emphasis will finally fall, on a new type of popular art or a new type of pandering to the appetites.”

Either way, Siegel’s analysis presents a frightening portrait of the future—with entertainment bringing more and more of the weird and exotic into the center of the American consciousness—fueling an antinomian revolution, accompanied by canned laughter or a sophisticated soundtrack.

A strange validation of Siegel’s thesis appears in the very same issue of The New Republic, when columnist Michelle Cottle suggests that Big Love points to an opportunity for Americans to rethink marriage. In her view, two parents are simply not enough for today’s postmodern family. In most families “there is a corrosive shortage of support—of the physical, logistical, and, perhaps most importantly, emotional kinds—once consistently provided by your garden variety housewife.”

Now that very few women are traditional housewives, perhaps there is the need, she suggests, for another committed adult in the picture. This new addition would not be “interested in procreating,” she insists, but would give himself or herself to the welfare of the family. In today’s highly stressed families, another wife and mom might help, she suggests.

“It is into this breach that an extra wife could step,” she suggests. “Better still, since the kind of multi-spouse arrangement I am envisioning isn’t about maximizing the number of offspring, one could just as easily have a household with two husbands. Indeed, the key to this brand of polygamy would be to make clear upfront that the second-spouse slot was for a woman or man specifically not interested in procreating. After all, how could you save labor with two families’ worth of kids but not two full families’ worth of parents?”

Cottle offers her tongue-in-cheek proposal as an angular critique of contemporary family life and marriage. Nevertheless, the very fact that Big Love would serve as the catalyst for her article, and polygamy as the prompt for her consideration, is significant. As Siegel, along with Gabler and Postman now warn, our entertainment threatens to become our reality.

Popular entertainment has become an ocean of antinomianism. This is perfectly suited for the temper of our times. Now that polygamy is presented as a natural theme for popular entertainment, what comes next?

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A sick video game about Columbine (townhall.com, 060519)

by Brent Bozell

Seven years ago, the entire country was rocked by the shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Hundreds of news stories and hours upon hours of cable news dwelled upon the horrid and senseless slaughter perpetrated by diabolic teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Thirteen were killed and 20 were wounded on that awful, awful day — April 20, 1999.

That black story is back in the news, with a twist that is at once shocking and, sadly, unsurprising. The Rocky Mountain News reports some deeply disturbed jerk has produced an Internet video game out of the Columbine massacre that puts players in the boots of the killers. It’s called “Super Columbine Massacre RPG.”

The trend toward violent video games just gets sicker by the day. Contemplate this sad fact: The game’s been downloaded for free an estimated 10,000 times.

A player starting the game is met with this statement: “Welcome to Super Columbine Massacre RPG! You play as Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on that fateful day in the Denver suburb of Littleton. How many people they kill is ultimately up to you.”

The game player is represented by Harris throughout the game. The player navigates scenes that require Harris to plant bombs in the school cafeteria, meet Klebold on a hill outside the school, and attack students inside the school. In each killing scene, the player has the option to play on “auto” mode, in which the game chooses the weapon, or on “manual,” in which the player decides whether to use a gun or a bomb.

Each time the Harris and Klebold characters kill someone in the game, a dialogue box pops up on the screen with the words, “Another victory for the Trench Coat Mafia.” There’s also dialogue in the game where after you kill students, you’re praised for being “brave boys.” As if gunning down unarmed students you’ve never met is somehow courageous.

Parents of the real victims are understandably stunned. “It’s wrong,” said Joe Kechter, whose son Matt was killed in the library. Brian Rohrbough, whose son Dan was murdered on a sidewalk outside the school, put it best: “We live in a culture of death, so it doesn’t surprise me that this stuff has become so commonplace.” He added: “when people glorify murderers, they make murder acceptable.”

The warped individual who created this game is most proud of himself. He told the Rocky Mountain News that he attended a different Colorado high school at the time, and he wanted to make something “profoundly unique and confrontational,” which he has certainly achieved. He also professes some admiration for the murderers. They were “at times, very thoughtful, sensitive, and intelligent young men.” It was “empowering to see two oppressed, marginalized kids rise up.” He then says this could be oversimplified, since he claims he made the game to spur “inquiry and civil discourse.”

The sicko also thinks the game is “innately comedic,” due to its extremely simplistic, low-tech graphics, making a violent school shooting into a “game with tiny, cartoonish sprites ... that make firing a TEC-9 feel like casting a magic spell.” It “parodies video games.”

His nihilism comes through as he denounces “platitudes and panaceas” about why it happened and how it can be prevented from happening again. Harris and Klebold were “canaries in the mine ... precursors to the collapse of modern civilization.” “Society,” he complains, “has a powerful self-preservation meme [cultural tradition] and most people are incurably affected by it. Thankfully, I’m not — hence, the game.”

Our inventor is also a pompous hypocrite and a coward. Contrary to his claims, he is affected enough by a self-preservation streak that he insists on hiding behind the veil of anonymity.

Sadly, this genius has allies among video-game enthusiasts. Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech who specializes in video-game criticism, is ecstatic about re-enacting Columbine. “I think the effort is brave, sophisticated, and worthy of praise from those of us interested in video games with an agenda,” he declares. The game isn’t fun, but it’s challenging, he writes, “conceptually difficult. We need more of that.” But the game doesn’t reward you for putting your gun down and going home. It rewards you and calls you brave for killing innocent teenagers. Why Georgia Tech hasn’t fired this idiot is a disgraceful mystery.

It’s stories like this that underline why states are cracking down on the sale of violent video games to minors. Violent video game legislation has passed in Michigan, Illinois and California, and is being considered in many states including Missouri, Kansas, and Minnesota as well as at the federal level.

But the players of “Super Columbine RPG” don’t need an ID to prove they’re adults. Any child can just download this sick game, free of charge, in the privacy of his own disturbed world.

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Movie raters: Christian themes won’t be factor: Decision comes after ‘proselytizing’ film given ‘PG’ for calling on Jesus (WorldNetDaily, 060802)

The movie ratings board run by Hollywood’s six top studios is back-pedaling from a process that reportedly used to target movies for PG ratings if they carried an evangelical Christian message, WorldNetDaily has learned.

The move by the Motion Picture Association of America followed controversy over a rating for Sony Provident Films’ “Facing the Giants,” which was given the PG tag after officials told the movie’s makers it was because it was so Christian.

“The scene that caught the association’s attention was an exchange between a coach and a player,” said Ted Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission in an op-ed piece published this week. “The coach assures the player that following Jesus Christ is a decision everyone makes for himself, but, if he accepts Christ, it will change his life.”

The PG decision prompted 15,000 e-mails of protest, and now things have changed.

“The chairman of the MPAA’s ratings board, Joan Graves, announced the association would no longer consider statements of faith or religious content as ‘thematic element’ that could trigger a rating of PG or higher,” Baehr confirmed.

Graves, through spokeswoman Kori Bernards at the MPAA, insisted she only was clarifying that using Christian statements for a rating never happened, and the movie’s rating actually was based on a conversation within the movie that refers to infertility.

But those involved with the film believe they understand.

“They’re going to say they never consider a religious reference (in setting ratings),” said Tom Snyder, editor of MovieGuide, a publication that reviews and rates movies for their family values and quality content.

Baehr said that after the flood of protests over “Giants,” many times the number of protests for any previous dispute, Hollywood was worried, and the result was a meeting among the power brokers where Graves provided her assurance a similar decision wouldn’t be made again.

Bernards said Graves attended the meeting and simply “clarified” that religious content was not used for the rating.

But Nancy Lovell, a spokeswoman for the film company, said it was clear at the outset that was what had happened.

Kris Fuhr is vice president of marketing at Provident, which plans to release the film in the fall in hundreds of theaters nationwide. He told reporters the MPAA had decided the film carried too many messages from one religion and that might be offensive to those from other religions. He said the MPAA described the movie, which contains no profanity, no violence and no sex, as “proselytizing.”

“That’s exactly what happened,” Lovell told WorldNetDaily.

Even Congress jumped aboard when the complaints were rolling in. U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., said it was “disquieting” to consider that the MPAA “considers exposure to Christian themes more dangerous for children than exposure to gratuitous sex and mindless violence.”

The movie is a story about a burned-out football coach and the miracles that change his life for the better. It was written and produced by Alex and Stephen Kendrick, both associate pastors of media at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Ga.

The $100,000 project used local volunteers as actors and hired a crew of professionals to do the filming.

The disagreement apparently will remain, with Graves telling Daily Variety promoters were mistaken in believing the film’s religious content was a factor and Lovell insisting the MPAA’s position has changed.

“Our attitude is to work with the industry and try to say, ‘Look, it doesn’t make any sense to offend all the Christians in the country when you can make movies that everybody can enjoy,’” said Snyder.

In his op-ed, printed in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Monday, Baehr said the rating controversy was just one of the indicators that Christians are having an impact in Hollywood.

He also cited Disney’s decision to drop R-rated projects in favor of family-friendly fare.

“Year after year, films containing morally uplifting, redemptive and even Christian content, earn at least three to seven times more than movies with explicit, potentially offensive elements,” Baehr noted.

The MPAA’s guidelines say PG-rated films may include profanity, violence and even brief nudity. “The theme of a PG-rated film may itself call for parental guidance,” the group said.

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Television Viewing and Autism . . . a Link? (Mohler, 061017)

Researchers at Cornell University are reporting a “statistically significant relationship” between autism and early television viewing in children. The best summary of the findings is available at Slate.com in an article by Gregg Easterbrook.

As Easterbrook explains:

The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.

The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. “We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we’re saying we have found a critical piece of evidence,” Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me. Because autism rates are increasing broadly across the country and across income and ethnic groups, it seems logical that the trigger is something to which children are broadly exposed. Vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines, while the autism rise has continued since worrisome compounds in vaccines were banned. What if the malefactor is not a chemical? Studies suggest that American children now watch about four hours of television daily. Before 1980—the first kids-oriented channel, Nickelodeon, dates to 1979—the figure is believed to have been much lower.

Then:

The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.

This study is indeed a potential bombshell. The very fact that the emergence of cable television and the VCR is correlated with the dramatic rise in cases of reported autism is most interesting. The researchers were clear to stipulate that correlation does not prove causation, but the link appears to be most suggestive.

We know that television is a powerful medium. The American Academy of Pediatrics has advised parents of children under age 2 not to allow any television exposure.

The experience of watching television is passive rather than active. The child’s imagination is not required to provide the images — the screen does that for them. Television does not encourage active thought nor does it develop the attention span. Many researchers suggest that the experience of viewing television can affect the cognitive and neurological development of the child.

Christian parents should be concerned about the influence of television in the lives of their children, young and old. The possible link with autism is suggestive and fascinating, but the influence of television is of importance to all parents — not only those dealing with autism. We cannot allow the television to function as a surrogate parent or substitute teacher.

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Report: More Media Consumption, Less Commitment to Traditional Values (Christian Post, 070607)

WASHINGTON – Americans who watch more hours of television tend to be less committed to classical virtues such as honesty and fairness and less likely to value religious principles, according to a conservative media watchdog.

In a study commissioned by the Culture and Media Institute (CMI), 47% of light TV viewers (one hour or less per evening) attend church frequently compared to 28% of heavy TV viewers (four or more hours). And while 29% of light TV viewers rarely or never attend church, the number jumps to 51% among heavy TV viewers.

Moreover, 43% of light TV viewers try to live by God’s principles compared to 32% of heavy TV viewers.

Measuring how the general American public perceives the impact of news and entertainment media, the study found the majority of Americans believe the media have a negative effect on moral values in America.

Another major finding in the study, titled “The Media Assault on American Values,” revealed that the more television a person watches, the less likely the person is to believe the media are negatively impacting the nation’s moral values.

According to the newly released study, 76% of light TV viewers see the media’s impact as negative, but only 58% of heavy TV viewers agree. Also, only 6% of light TV viewers believe the media are helping moral values while 14% of heavy viewers see a positive effect.

Some five decades ago, television had presented a traditional perspective on life that was more consistent with the values parents held, according to Dr. S. Robert Lichter, president of Center for Media and Public Affairs.

“That world did exist,” he said Wednesday at the release of the report whose cover depicts mainstream media as soldiers attacking such traditional institutions as family and church.

Today, viewers frequently find sexualized content on television. Thirty-nine percent of light TV viewers say sex between unmarried adults is always wrong compared to 26% of heavy TV viewers. A recent episode of CBS’ popular Two and a Half Men featured a casual conversation between lead character Charlie and Myra just after they had sex in a coat closet at the wedding of her brother Herb and Judith. “I’m two for two at Judith’s weddings,” said Charlie in the April episode. He later says, “[W]hat about funerals? Can you beat a three-way in a hearse?”

“This is not unusual for television,” said Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Media Institute, as he presented the study results.

Overall, 74% of Americans believe the nation’s moral values have declined over the past 20 years and 68% say the media have a negative impact on moral values. Also, 64% agree the media are an important factor in shaping moral values in this country.

Today, however, national broadcast and cable networks and newspapers have lost huge chunks of their audience. As L. Brent Bozell III, founder and president of Media Research Center, put it, “The national media are on a meltdown.” Meanwhile, Americans are flooding radio talk show programs and the top 20 recently listed (ranked by listening audience) were all conservative, according to Michael Medved who hosts one of the most popular radio talk shows.

Forty-four percent of Americans see the news media tilting left; 27% say news media are balanced; and 17% say the news media favors conservatives.

“Given the fact that you have such a clear indication that people see the media as biased ... why, with the profit-motive operative, do you still have the media clearly tilting left and people recognize that they tilt to the left,” posed Medved.

But there has been progress, Medved noted, with the rise of religion in media, including Hollywood. This past weekend, two movies debuted at the box office – “Knocked Up” and “Mr. Brooks.” Both debuted in the top five and although not faith-based, both had pro-life messages, Medved pointed out. The messages are reflective of the sharp drop of abortions in the United States since 1980 from 43% to 22% per 1,000 teens, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

So there is progress, said Medved.

Still, the media’s impact is negative, the majority of Americans believe. And Medved does not just point to the quality of what the media presents. The “problem is high quantity, not low quality,” he said.

Medved clarified that the study measures differential correlation based upon the quantity of television a person watches and not the quality.

“We need to employ increasingly demand-side solutions, not supply-side solutions,” he urged. “We have been increasingly concerned with what Hollywood makes and not what we take.”

“The Media Assault on American Values” report is the second in a series of reports of CMI’s National Cultural Values Survey. The overall study was conducted on 2,000 American adults in December 2006.

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Christian Teens Embracing Harder Rock Music (Christian Post, 080408)

The younger generation of Christians is embracing music with a harder edge, according to a popular magazine for Christian teens that announced in its latest issue its readers’ top music choices.

For the past few years, singers from traditional pop/rock favorites claimed top positions in Ignite Your Faith’s annual readers’ choice awards, dubbed the Golden Ear Awards.

But this year, a majority of the 5,000 magazine readers who voted, aged 13 to 18, leaned in favor of hard rock bands bumping down pop and soft rock groups. The results are published in the April/May issue.

The trend is most evident in the award’s Best Vocalist category.

John Cooper of Skillet won the Best Male Vocalist – a title that bounced between Jason Dunn (Hawk Nelson), Matt Thiessen (Relient K) and Jeremy Camp in previous cycles of the awards. Trevor McNevan of Thousand Foot Krutch placed second.

The Best Female Vocalist category welcomed its first ever winner from a hard rock band: Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf. The frontwoman beat out former holders of the title, Tricia Brock (Superchick) and Alyssa Barlow (BarlowGirl).

“That one surprised me most,” said Todd Hertz, managing editor of Ignite Your Faith, to The Christian Post. “I did not think our readership would go in that direction.”

Meanwhile, pop artist Rebecca St. James, who placed third in that category in 2006, moved down to fifth. Any lower than fifth would have placed her only in the honorable mention list.

Hertz, who oversees the Entertainment part of the 100,000-circulation magazine, said he sees three main factors that account for the readers’ shift in musical preferences.

One factor is loyalty, he said.

Skillet fans, who call themselves “panheads,” are “ferocious in their loyalty to this band,” explained Hertz. “They are always flocking to support this band.”

The fans are loyal to the point that they voted for John Cooper’s wife Kori Cooper in the Best Female Vocalist category even though she was not a nominee and for Skillet in the Best New Artist category when the rock band has been around for years, he noted.

Secondly, Hertz said the recent results show a shift in the types of music that appeal to young people these days.

“I think it comes from mainstream culture. Harder rock appeals to younger kids, whether it helps get out the feeling or emotion...I’m not sure what it is,” he shared, adding that what was once considered rock is now considered Pop music.

And lastly, the magazine’s managing editor believes the iPod culture has allowed teens to access a variety of musical genres instead of only hearing songs selected by radio stations.

“Christian music is more diverse than it’s ever been,” Hertz added.

Voting for the Golden Ear Awards were held last November.

The magazine, part of Christianity Today International, is currently gathering votes for its Golden Remote Award, which recognizes the most redeeming TV character. Voting will be open until May 8 with the results announced in the Sept./Oct. issue.

In February, readers weighed in for the Golden Nacho Awards, selecting the most redeeming movies. Those winners will be revealed in the June/July issue.

According to Hertz, a bulk of the content from the magazine caters to young readers’ entertainment interests.

Last November, Ignite Your Faith launched “The Heroes Of Rock,” an online cartoon series starring popular bands. The first episode’s special gueststars Superchick members who performed their own voiceovers. The latest episode, slated for release at the end of April, features Hawk Nelson and a special music artist, whose identity is yet to be revealed, said Hertz.

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