PreachersWife2004 said:
Years ago, this wouldn't be acceptable at all. We did have standards back then. National TV, local TV, wouldn't have played such a provocative performance. Our high school dance team wouldn't have been allowed to do a routine like that, and I went to a somewhat liberal high school.
I shared this in another thread, but I recently heard an episode of Red Skelton's last radio show before he moved over to television. At the end, when he was giving his farewell speech and saying all of his thank yous, he said how grateful he was to have been invited as a guest into people's homes and stated that he was sorry if anything they had done had caused any offense. The only thing harder to imagine than Red Skelton doing anything to offend on his show is the idea of anyone in Hollywood today not wanting to offend somebody.
The idea among radio shows and in the early days of TV was that you were a guest in someone's home and should act accordingly.
Now, it's as if they go out of their way to "push the envelope" and be offensive. There was a time when Ricky Ricardo wasn't even allowed to tell people his wife was pregnant. Now, shows like "Sixteen and Pregnant" actually celebrate teen pregnancy. Where once, even married couples were not allowed to be shown in bed together (I guess if anybody asked, Rob Petrie just had sleep apnea that kept Laura awake), people routinely live together before marriage, marriage is mocked, and sexual promiscuity among children goes on without even raising an eyebrow.
In our family, we began slowly blocking out shows and then entire channels until there was only about three or four hours of available TV a week to choose from. Somebody suggested a British sci-fi show which featured a homosexual "hero" who went through time having sex with virtually everything that moved (of course, they neglected to mention the homosexual part or the part about the promiscuity). We watched about ten minutes of it and when my thirteen year old son turned to me and said, "Dad, we shouldn't be watching this", that was the straw that broke the camel's back.
So now we don't have a TV. We watch sports via the internet and we watch RFD and Blue Highway via the internet. Everything else is on DVD.
About the only thing we can't get is the Porter Wagoner Show, but I'm able to get DVDs of those.
I like that my sons have role models like Ben Cartwright and John Wayne instead of the gay guy from Torchwood and any of a hundred little boys pretending to be men on TV. I love that my daughters have Nancy Drew and Laura Ingalls Wilder and not Brittany Spears or Hannah Montana.
I know that means people are going to laugh at us, and I'm OK with that. I'm a big boy. I can handle people laughing at me for abiding by Biblical principles, but what I will not tolerate is having my children exposed to immorality.
And that's why we've made the decision to kick TV out of our home.
And we wonder why teen pregnancy rates are up these days.
If more people had "knee jerk" reactions, perhaps our kids wouldn't be so lost.
People today aren't willing to give up their own youth. People want to stay children forever and to lay down rules (and God forbid introducing morality!) means that they're now the adults they so desperately want to avoid becoming. And for those who are parents, the priority isn't on being a parent, but on showing their children that they're "hip" and "cool" and being their children's friend.
