Falwell Denounces ABC’s Bleeping of ‘Jesus’
from the Jesus,-what-next? dept.
On a recent episode of ABC’s “The View” (a daytime chat show), one of the on-air personalities, Joy Behar, said of her having ended televised weigh-ins as part of an ongoing diet feature, “Yes, and thank you, thank you, Jesus, is all I have to say.” ABC ran the statement uncut in the show’s live broadcast, but when us poor relations on the West Coast saw the tape-delayed version, the word “Jesus” had been bleeped out. Which would be a perfectly good lies.com story in and of itself, but then it gets an extra layer: televangelist Jeffy Falwell has apparently objected to the bleeping, though I’m not sure why. According to the AP story on the incident, “Falwell, in a newspaper column, said he believed ABC’s action was wrong. What makes it worse, he said, is that many cable television networks are habitually blasphemous.” Huh? But see, they bleeped the word precisely because they were worried that its use as a casual exclamation would offend peckerheads like him. I tried to track down the column in which he made the statement, but after several minutes of plowing through his words of wisdom at www.falwell.com (plus an entertaining detour through www.jerryfalwell.com) I gave up. If any of you happen to come across it, would you let me know? Thanks. Update: Lucy tracked it down for me. Here’s Falwell’s column, where he (of course) intentionally misconstrues ABC’s action as being part of a blanket erasing of the word “Jesus” from all broadcasts, ignoring that the network uses it all the time to actually refer to Jesus, and only has a policy of bleeping its use as an irreligious exclamation. That guy is such a pud whack.
