Those who tuned into C-SPAN Monday morning were treated to an interesting tag-team lecture by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on the Senate floor.
The so-called "Marriage Protection Amendment" (MPA), which for the first time would have written bigotry into the U.S. Constitution, had been voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee late last week, and as promised by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), it was brought up for a vote before the full Senate on Monday – but first it had to survive a cloture vote. In other words, its Republican backers had to find 60 senators willing to close debate on the issue and bring it to a floor vote. They managed 49, just one more than they managed to get the last time this religio-reactionary idiocy was considered in 2004.
The Durbin/Reid lecture was part of that debate, with each senator asking the other rhetorical questions about why spending the Senate's valuable time on a constitutional amendment that would prevent gay citizens from being allowed to marry was more important than doing something about record-high gasoline prices, a national debt approaching $9 trillion, an unwinnable war in Iraq that was costing $211 million per day and about a dozen other important matters.
The pair regaled the few senators who remained in the chamber, not to mention the television audience, on this subject for the better part of an hour, and previewed a similar debate scheduled for later this week on an anti-flag-burning amendment, whose primary (if not sole) purpose, like the MPA, was to get on the official record the names of those senators voting in opposition, for use by the Karl Rove-directed nationwide political campaigns to target those nay-sayers as unAmerican, unChristian and, likely, agents of Satan – and definitely people who should be voted out of high office.
What Durbin and Reid did, however, was exactly the correct response to the Republicans' game ... but it was also a month late and, in a sense, a dollar short.
See, on May 18, these same two senators, along with all the rest, had voted to pass S. 193, the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005, which, among other things, increased the fines for violations on TV and radio broadcasters for "transmission of obscene, indecent and profane language" ten-fold, from $32,500 per incident to $325,000 "for each violation or each day of a continuing violation, except that the amount assessed for any continuing violation shall not exceed a total of $3,000,000" – THREE MILLION DOLLARS! –- "for any single act or failure to act."
In other words, if, in future, Janet Jackson's tit gets shown on national TV during the SuperBowl half-time: $325,000 per airing station ... at least!
Fox Broadcasting shows a computer-blurred image of a couple having sex: $325,000 per airing station ... at least!
Radio jocks Opie and Anthony broadcast the sounds of a couple having sex in St. Patrick's Cathedral: $325,000 per airing station ... at least!
Today, the U.S. House passed that same measure – and the Las Vegas book isn't offering any odds on whether Bush will sign it.
"This legislation will make television and radio more family friendly by allowing the FCC to impose stiffer fines on broadcasters who air obscene or indecent programming," Bush told the L.A. Times in the e-mailed statement.
The result, of course, will be continued loss of viewers and listeners on broadcast radio and TV channels, as network chiefs and station owners get more and more paranoid – with good reason, of course – that some inadvertent slip by one of their talking heads or technicians allows a nipple or a "fuck" to go out over the air, garnering them a minimum $325,000 fine and a black mark on their permanent record come license renewal time.
Perhaps those chiefs and owners should feel happy that the House merely agreed to S. 193, rather than pushing for adoption of its own bill, H.R. 310, which it passed in February. That bill called for $500,000 fines, added several "additional factors" the FCC could consider in deciding what amount of fine to levy, required (unpaid) public service announcements to be broadcast as part of the "remedy," set forth criteria for license revocation proceedings for broadcasting the naughty material, and required the FCC to report to Congress on the number of complaints it received during the year, and what it did about them.
Of course, the bill doesn't (yet) apply to cable and satellite programming, and as broadcast shows begin more and more to resemble variations on The 700 Club, more and more viewers and listeners will be tuning them out and subscribing – that is, paying – to hear free speech from the only venues where they can get it: Cable and satellite. That movement will lead to even more banal programming, not to mention higher ad rates to pay for the ever-decreasing viewer- and listenership.
"What is at stake here is freedom of speech and whether it will be nibbled to death by election-minded politicians and self-righteous pietists," Representative Gary Ackerman, Democrat of New York, said in a statement.
No shit!
"Chief supporter Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., said the new fines were appropriate for getting 'the filth and triple-X smut off the public airwaves'," noted the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "Cable and satellite still can do as they please and, no, 'indecent' has not been defined. Guess we'll know it when we see it."
Some were happy.
"This is a question of how broadcasters use (and too often abuse) the licenses issued by the Federal government," wrote Tony Perkins, head of the Family research Council. "The airwaves are your airwaves. They don't belong to the broadcasters, they belong to the public."
"We hope that the hefty fines will cause the multi-billion-dollar broadcast networks finally to take the law seriously," said Parents Television Council President Brent Bozell, whose organization, representing just a tiny fraction of the viewing public, filed more than 98 percent of the indecency complaints received by the FCC last year.
Nothing like creating your own "public" to object, sheep-like, to the material you don't like!
California residents may be interested in knowing that Republican Congresscritters Duncan Hunter, Darrell Issa, Jerry Lewis, Daniel Lundgren, Howard "Buck" McKeon, Devin Nunes, Richard Pombo and George Radnovich, as well as Democrats Joe Baca, Lois Capps, Sam Farr, Doris Matsui, Juanita Millender-McDonald, George Miller, Loretta Sanchez, Adam Schiff and Mike Thompson voted for the bill. Those who voted against it from California were only Democrats: Xavier Becerra, Michael Honda, Barbara Lee, Brad Sherman, Pete Stark, Maxine Waters and Diane Watson. Two 'Pubs, including Sonny Bono's widow, crapped out of the voting altogether.
That might be something worth remembering come the November elections.
