The Fatuous Five
Unless you live in Utah, Kansas, North Dakota, Indiana or Montana (or are a hardcore political geek), it is highly unlikely that you’ve ever heard of Republican Senators Mike Lee (UT) Roger Marshall (KS), Kevin Cramer (ND), Mike Braun (IN) or Steve Daines (MT). You really should know who they are and where they stand on social/cultural issues, for they represent an extraordinarily weird and wacky wing of the Republican Party . . . a wing that is on the rise. The “Fatuous Five,” as I choose to call them, are uniformly against any and all abortions (and mind you, Senator Marshall is an OB-GYN), same-sex marriage, any and all restrictions on guns, gays in the military, the separation of Church and State, and are positive that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
While these political positions are hardly unusual for Republican members of the House and Senate, the Fatuous Five go even further down the path towards turning America into a blended theocratic/autocratic state. They are to the far-right what “The Squad” (the unofficial six-member [5 women, 1 man] progressive block in the House of Representatives are to the Congressional left. Unlike the Fatuous Five, which is made up exclusively of midwestern Anglo men, the Squad’s membership is exclusively made up of people of color; 2 are practicing Muslims.
Unlike Congressional Republicans, who tend to exile those who do not pay strict obeisance to their erstwhile leader to the political version of Elba . . . exempli gratia anyone who voted in favor of convicting Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial or publicly admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election . . . Democrats tend to work with most every member of their caucus even when or where they may disagree. Why is this so? Generally speaking, Democrats actually do believe that a party of inclusion is where it’s at, while Republicans tend to proclaim themselves to be a “Big Tent” while actually practicing behind a barricade of exclusion.
Want further proof?
Last month, the “Fatuous Five” addressed a letter to the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board Chair Charles Rivkin. In their letter to Rivkin. who is also serves as CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), the five outlined their reasons for trying to create a new rating for television shows that feature LGBTQ+ characters and topics. In their letter, the Fatuous Five thanked Rivkin and the monitoring board “. . . for empowering parents through the provision of tools that enable them to identify television content that is not suitable for certain ages. In recent years, concerning topics of a sexual nature have become aggressively politicized and promoted in children’s programming, including irreversible and harmful experimental treatments for mental disorders like gender dysphoria. To this end, we strongly urge you to update the TV Parental Guidelines and ensure they are up-to-date on best practices that help inform parents on this disturbing content.”
For a party so hellbent on complaining about “cancel culture”, the GQP (“Grand QAnon Party”) seems to be really obsessed with cancel culture.
In its own way, this is nothing new. Back in the early 1920s after the film industry went through a series of tragedies which gave the public a shocking look behind the virginal curtain of Hollywood (the morphine overdose of the “All-American” actor Wallace Reid, the murder of starlet Virginia Rappé at the hands of everyone’s favorite funnyman Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and the murder of the urbane director William Desmond Taylor), Hollywood moguls hired President Warren G. Harding’s Postmaster General (At a salary $150k per annum (which is more than $2.5 million in 2022 dollars) to become the industry’s “moral’s czar.” It was his responsibility to make sure that all actors, directors and producers toe the moral line. Then, in 1934, a new code (called “The Breen Code”) came into effect which forced all gay actors to enter into “lavender marriages” (marriages arranged by Hollywood studios between gay, lesbian or bisexual people such as Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates; Rudolph Valentino and Natasha Rambova; Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester; Judy Garland and Vincent Minelli; Janet Gaynor and costume designer Adrian, etc.), as well as creating a list of words which could not be said (“raspberries!” “So's your old man,” “nuts!” Damn!” and others, as well as such no-nos as:
If a married couple were shown in the bedroom, they had to be sleeping in separate beds;
No kiss could last longer than 3 seconds;
Miscegenation (interracial relationships) were not allowed;
Scenes of childbirth were never to be shown;
Illegal drug usage could not be presented;
Words like "God," "Lord," "Jesus," "Christ," "hell," and "damn" could not be used unless it was in connection with religious ceremonies.
The Production Code came into desuetude by the end of the 1960s, when the “X-Rated” movie, “Midnight Cowboy” won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Since then, movie ratings (”G,” “PG,” and “M”) have meant next to nothing. But now they may be reemerging, thanks to folks like the Fatuous Five. What they are most concerned about are cartoons and Disney pictures which have “ . . . dialogue [which] often involves the promotion of irreversible experimental treatments that involve surgical and otherwise invasive cosmetic procedures that are detrimental and life-altering, and do not evidence medical necessity. The motivations of hypersexualized entertainment producers striving to push this content on young audiences are suspect at best and predatory at worst.” The senators added that “To the detriment of children, gender dysphoria has become sensationalized in the popular media and television with radical activists and entertainment companies. This radical and sexual sensation not only harms children, but also destabilizes and damages parental rights.”
What the Fatuous Five are asking for are warning labels [⚠️] for the country's television ratings system to warn parents about "sexual orientation and gender identity content" on children's TV shows. As one of my dear, long, longtime (more than 40 years) friends, the supreme political activist Marc Kallick recently wrote me in an email, “This will obviously then lead to a prohibition of openly LGBTQ+ spokespersons, such as when TV programming has any LGBTQ+ content., teachers and the illumination of any openly LGBTQ+ spokespeople in our contemporary American society.”
Mark also noted, “ . . . one of these five regressive Senators, the reprehensible and repugnant Senator Braun of Indiana, has just announced that individual states should have the legal right to prohibit interracial marriages… overthrowing the established judicial precedent from the 1967 Supreme Court decision, Loving V. the State of Virginia, which legalized interracial marriages. In order to stuff our American societies’ genie back into the bottle, will painfully require, taking a sharp knife to the genie… severely cutting away huge hunks of societal flesh, in order to stuff the genie back through the bottle’s narrow neck. This narrow minded approach, for the future of the world’s most open and leading democracy, will prove to be… bloody, painful and profoundly detrimental!!”
As what we would hope and pray is a free and open society, many of our leaders - and we, their constituents - have put our blood, sweat, tears and donations into protecting women’s reproductive rights, equality for minorities of all stripes and colors, and making healthcare available to all. Now, in what seems like the wink of an eye, many of these rights - and more - are slowly and inexorably being attacked and slipping through our fingers. We’ve gone from Indiana Senator Braun, suggesting the reversing of federal recognition, of interracial marriages to quickly following on the heels of the Fatuous Five demanding labeling for LGBTQ+ television content.
Until recently, I have never considered the “slippery slope” argument (“Today the government takes away our right to having unfettered access to guns or any sort, and tomorrow they’ll come to take all our guns away”) to be much more than the product of paranoid minds possessing little - if any - regard for history or reality. Of late, however, I have observed the slope becoming increasingly steeper and slipperier. I have studied history well, and know that in the 1930s Nazis required labeling Homosexuals with a pink triangle to be worn on their/our clothing (while lesbians were required to be forcibly impregnated for the continuation of the, so-called, Aryan Race). Jewish Homosexuals were required to wear a pink triangle with an overlapping yellow triangle . . . thus forming the identifying Homosexual/Jewish Star.
The explosive growth of homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism and religious intolerance, coupled with highly-armed bigots who will believe next to anything just so long as it is broadcast by people who call themselves “patriots” - makes me uncomfortably nauseous and deeply troubled.
Is there an answer to what ails us short of taking a super strong emetic? Perhaps remembering the words of Dr. Benjamin Franklin will give a suggestive clue. The story is told that as Franklin was walking out of Independence Hall after the Constitutional Convention in 1787, someone shouted out, “Doctor, what have we got? A republic or a monarchy?”
To which Franklin supposedly responded, with a rejoinder at once witty and ominous: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
I wonder if the Fatuous Five and their priggish followers have the slightest idea of what the good doctor was speaking about . . .
Copyright©2022 Kurt F. Stone