LA Weekly: The New Blacklist

that christian conservatives are targeting corporations that give minimal lip service to the gay community is not the point of this post.

that should be no surprise. if you can burn a book you can write a letter saying gay people throwing javelins don't deserve corporate sponsorship - or you'll never buy Tide again.

this is the point:

There’s one big problem: Nobody at the national level is tracking these Christer censorship and pressure campaigns in a systematic way, to quantify them or assess their impact, so that strategies to defeat them can be developed. “People for the American Way used to track this stuff, but they stopped doing so systematically in 1996. We at Political Research Associates would love to do it,” says Berlet, “but we don’t have the resources. Groups like the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute or Americans United for Separation of Church and State could easily do this sort of work. But none of us has the money to do it, because nobody wants to give it. There used to be three major journalists writing about this stuff — Sara Diamond, Russ Belant and Fred Clarkson. But none of them could make a living doing it, and they’ve all dropped out of the game.”

Unless Hollywood, and the entertainment and broadcast industries, all want to live through an epoch of increasing content blackmail and blacklists, the wealthy folks who make a lot of money from those industries better wake up and start funding intensive and systematic research on the Christian right and its censorship crusades against sexual subversion and sin in the creative arts — or soon it will be too late, and the “theocratic oligopoly” of which Martin Kaplan speaks will be so firmly established it cannot be dislodged.

what's going on, big rich progressives? why is their side rolling in the dough and our side limping along? where's the money to go where our mouths are? their side is incredibly well-organized and ours is...what? balkanized? pathetic!

LA Weekly: Features: The New Blacklist