Brent Bozell examines ABC’s cancellation of a summer reality show under pressure from the political correctness crowd. The irony is that while it was liberal politically correct groups that opposed “Welcome to the Neighborhood,” it was white, middle-class Christian Bush voters who were the object of the show’s scorn. The premise is that a neighborhood of these people have to choose who will win a new house on their cul-de-sac and the potential winners are a litany of the typical people that the media template says the white Christian conservatives will be biased against.
Gay groups didn’t like the fact that the Christians didn’t automatically accept the gays in one episode, even though they came around according to the Hollywood script by the end of the series. Fair housing groups didn’t like the idea that it showed neighbors choosing who could move in among them. And so on.
Under this pressure, ABC caved and cancelled the show. Huh. I thought Hollywood decried censorship and those intolerant people who dared to infringe on their creative license. Ah but, that’s just censorship from the right-wing conservatives. When it’s liberals infringing on their creativity, then it’s just fine. Wouldn’t want to get left off the cocktail party invitation lists.
The hypocrisy is not surprising, but it is breathtaking in its brazenness.
Welcome to my world!
Let’s not forget that the whole concept of a “reality show” is just plain stupid to begin with.
Dom, please let us not forget that discrimination in housing is not a trivial matter and that those who tend to suffer from it are not so outrageously deviant from moral and cultural norms as gay men who have adopted a black kid or tatooed Republicans but conventionally moral and economically appropriate folk who happen to be of the wrong color or the wrong religion. Note for example that the politically correct liberals in Brookline have their knickers in a knot over a provision reserving below-market units at the former St. Aidan Church for Catholics, despite that this provision was approved by the fed fair housing folk as appropriate compensation for a snafu in the condo conversion process. Indeed, what’s wrong with a parish stipulating as part of an agreement to sell its former church that units be reserved for Catholics of modest means, so long as other below-market units are available to non-Catholics?
I wasn’t making any judgment on the fair housing problems, just that it’s clear that Hollywood will cave much quicker to liberal demands for censorship than it will for conservative demands.