They Have No Shame

I never heard of Janet Parshall until the other night when I was walking by a TV at work and saw her on Larry King Live on CNN. During a discussion about the buzz surrounding "Brokeback Mountain", Parshall referred to the adoption of children by same-sex couples as "state-sanctioned child abuse" and implied that the "lifestyle" of Matthew Shepard, a gay man, was partly to blame for his 1998 murder. If you're not familiar with the Matthew Shepard story, you can read about it here. At first she tried to justify her comments by claiming that that what happened to him was "wrong, wrong and wrong." I think it was really Conservatively compassionate of her to say that a brutal murder was wrong. But then she went on to say that maybe Matthew was responsible for causing his own death because he was in the wrong place:

"But, in reality, I understand that Matthew was somewhat of a person who hung around some of the gay bars and was coming on to some people. So, was he looking for trouble in all the wrong places?"

I suppose that's like blaming the Jews for the Holocaust. You know, maybe if those uppity Jews weren't so successful with their doctors, lawyers and businesses, they would have been better Germans and Hitler would have left them alone. Yes, that foolish Matthew Sheppard. How dare he frequent a bar and be conned by a couple of lying murderers?

I suppose that Parshall would use the typical dodge that "we hate the sin and not the sinner." But if that's the case, you can go on CNN and claim to speak for gawd and jay-sus and spread your fairy tales about "fake families" and "homo-sex-shoo-al-itay", but don't blame a victim for his own murder by homophobic alchoholics.

The Janet Parshall Show is syndicated by the Salem Radio Network, a company that provides mostly Conservative radio talk shows. (Hey, we don't have enough of those, do we?) They claim to be a Christian operation, but they'll run anything they think will make a buck.

I can tell you that it would be useless for you to write or email Parshall, the Salem Radio Network, or XM Radio, which also carries her show. As a matter of fact, they would be glad to get the attention. Their belief is any publicity is better than no publicity at all. The most effective strategy is to contact her advertisers and politely claim that you'll refuse to buy any product that's associated with this type of hate speech. This works with any type of program that you might find offensive. Don't contact the network, station, program or carrier. Just write down the names of the sponsors and contact them. The advertisers do care about negative publicity and they don't want their products associated with it. You also might think that it would take hundreds or thousands of complaints for an advertiser to pull their dollars from a show, but that's not the case. As few as 50 complaints might get an advertiser thinking, because they know that for every complaint they do receive, there may be hundreds who won't be motivated to complain, they'll just stop buying the product.