Closing the Book of Daniel

Over at JackLewis.net I stumbled across a post about the cancellation of The Book of Daniel. It turns out the writer, Jack Kenny, blames a “Small Minority of Loud-Mouthed Bullies (SMLMB)” for the cancellation. Well, okay. He can characterize Christians unfavorably after The Book of Daniel’s cancellation just as he did before it - it’s a free country. It’s just that now he’s not getting paid for it, and his audience for it is more limited than it was while the show was on. I suppose he can get a blog to rant on like the rest of us.

The post at Jack Lewis made some good points, namely that Christians are not guilty of censorship because they engaged in free speech, and that homosexuals (Jack Kenny is homosexual) have frequently boycotted and complained when homosexuality is not portrayed they way they like in various forms of entertainment. What’s sauce for the goose…

I remember when the movie Philadelphia came out and people raved about it - how it would change the way people think about homosexuality and about AIDS. I thought then how hypocritical it was that the same group of people who claimed that violence in entertainment had no affect whatsoever on viewers was raving wildly about the social impact this movie would have.

The fact is that entertainment does have consequences. Having a message hammered in your ears week after week certainly does tend to reinforce it. Why do you think we’ve had Commander in Chief served up in plenty of time for the 2008 elections? Having the message hammered in time after time that Christians are bad (remember “poor, uneducated and easy to command”?) does matter. And this show may have been subtle about it, but packing the cast with that many “Christian” characters with such serious flaws would not have been tolated for any other group. Replace “Christian” with “Muslim” or “homosexual” and try to imagine the show getting aired at all, much less staying on as long as this show did. Not. A. Chance. Even though I didn’t boycott the show or email anyone about it, I can certainly understand why others felt they should.

You want a SMLMB? Try this on for size: Less than 5% of the population, by the most charitable estimates (Kinsey’s 10% has been debunked by so many reputable sources I can’t pick one. Google it.) that forces the other 95% to modify their behavior and speech. This tiny minority is statistically over-represented in journalism and entertainment and consequently is able to push their agenda at us from almost every media angle. And when it is rejected repeatedly at the ballot box, they ram it down our throats in the courts. Sounds like a Small Minority of Loud Mouthed Bullies to me.

My other posts on The Book of Daniel TV show are here.