A blonde woman, tears running down her face, looks into the camera and pleads, “Why did the Mormons do this to us?”

In a crowd of what I presume are gay activists (and not film goers), a young man sobs so hard that he has to be comforted by a female friend.

–

A bulldyke (I’m guessing) stares out at the viewer, her despondent face sopping wet.

And one of the stars of the film, a pretty gay boy (and ex-Mormon) named Tyler Barrick – who seems have been inspired by Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born – clings to his husband and bawls, “I can’t believe that people could hate us this much!” Really?  I can.

Judging from these nuggets, 8MP signals a new tactic (and new low) in the gay crusade to redefine the traditional meaning of the word “marriage”: frantic blubbering.   The filmmakers, all of whom are gay and most of whom boast street creds from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, seem to think they’ll win hearts and minds with a showy flood of tears.  They won’t.  The LGBT M.O .may have switched from rage to rue, but it’s still missing the mark.

Also irksome about this two-minute pity party are the vexing, tiresome questions it raises for independent gay people who don’t go in for Fire Island, Atlantis Cruises, zero-percent body fat, or mass approval: What’s wrong with this picture – and Why don’t I buy it?

The vast majority of Americans – many of them minorities, and many of them gay - simply believe a child’s best shot at a good life starts with a mother and a father, two consenting people of opposite sexes who can actually reproduce in the first place.  This belief has nothing to do with denying same-sex love, or equality, or rights.  It simply has to do with the basic, biological reality of conceiving and raising children.

Don’t get me wrong:  I’m continually thrilled and inspired by my fellow gays’ ability to build amazing lives, communities, and families for themselves, especially in the face of monumental adversities like AIDS.  And there is something truly heartwarming about the sight of two committed men (or women) reaching beyond themselves to care for a child (or two, or three).  Many gay people make exemplary parents.  We are, after all, human too (for those of you who think otherwise).

But the traditional definition of family remains sacrosanct to most Americans, and has since long before the Stonewall Riots brought gay rights out of the closet.  There’s nothing wrong with trusting in the conventional notion of the nuclear family, just as there is nothing wrong with being openly gay.  These two belief systems need to learn to COEXIST, as the bumper stickers say.  And that requires a two-way street.

“But Spain allows gay marriage – and that’s a Catholic country!” So what.  Spain doesn’t have three hundred million people living in it.

8MP promises to reveal details of a secret, “orchestrated campaign” by the Mormon Church to nefariously ban same-sex marriage across the entire USA.  Okay.  So remind me again what isn’t an orchestrated campaign?  When I see a montage of young, good looking, able-bodied homosexuals wracked with sobs because a church doesn’t approve of their lifestyle – Duh! - that strikes me as a campaign of emotional blackmail on a pretty grand scale.

To lend their conspiracy theory a malevolence it otherwise wouldn’t have, the filmmakers flash images of: George W. Bush (a.k.a. Evil Incarnate) shaking hands with a Mormon honcho; a young gay man bloodied in a riot (”I’m surprised I’m not dead!”), and a lesbian (I think) being led off in handcuffs (just in case you forgot you’re living in a police state).  And no piece of regressive – excuse me, progressive - propaganda would be complete without opportunistic prophecies of “the demise of our democracy!”

It’s true that Mormons, who comprise a measly two per cent of California’s population, managed to raise nearly half of the $22.8 million collected in support of Proposition 8 without drawing a lot of attention to themselves.  That’s modesty for you.  But contrary to popular mythology (and wishful thinking), that doesn’t mean the Church of LDS is the new Nazi Party.  As with the gay community, there is more diversity (of thought) among the pasty-faced followers of John Joseph Smith than meets the eye.

Just as all Muslims are not terrorists, all Mormons are not homophobes.  At the height of Prop 8 hysteria back in October 2008, The New Statesman reported that thousands of LDS believers demanded that their names be removed from Church records so they would not be associated with an organization perceived as being anti-gay.

“It’s been a very divisive issue,” said LA-based Mormon bishop Robert Bennion, who has an openly gay brother (with whom he is very close).  “It raises a lot of questions to which there aren’t a lot of crystal clear answers, and almost everybody feels like you have to be on one side or the other….  In my mind, it’s possible to be in favor of Proposition 8 without being anti-homosexual.”  Again, this is a war over a word.

For contrast, note the choice of words in this thoughtful comment left on an anti-Prop 8 website by a pro-gay marriage activist:  “I was going through the list of [Mormon] contributors and… I noticed that two people have died since making their donations, so I suppose that puts us up by two.  Every little bit helps!”  How many hearts and minds do you suppose he won that day?

8MP appears to be more of an anti-Valentine to Mormonism than a rational case for gay marriage (i.e. payback time for the filmmakers, including Oscar-winning Milk scribe Dustin Lance Black, who narrates).  After all, Mormons are, like the stereotype of Christians, devout white devils, the scapegoats of the age, the new boogeyman of post-9/11 America.

But as Jonah Goldberg posed to his fire-and-brimstone liberal readers:

“If opposition to gay marriage is morally indistinguishable from Jim Crow racism, anti-Semitism and the like (as so many of you say), why on earth aren’t you screaming bloody murder at Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid and the other Democratic politicians who run the US government?  Surely, they matter more than a few Mormon donors.  Why aren’t they bigots even though they hold the same fundamental position as Mormons?”

Thank you.

Meanwhile, where is the liberal rage at the world’s most extreme cadre of homophobes, the Islamic supremacists, whose “orchestrated campaign” against LGBT people goes far beyond preventing them from exchanging vows?  In 8MP, gay protesters display signs decrying “Christo-Fascists” - their oh-so-narrow comfort zone.  Mohammed-Fascists?  Off-limits.  Why?  Well, for one thing, those totalitarian bigots might actually respond.  And we wouldn’t want anyone to lose his or her head – literally – would we?

Unable to imagine a world in which Sarah Jessica Parker might not receive any more GLAAD awards, these short-sighted American whiners suffer glamorously for the camera, tears running carefully down their clean shaven (mostly Caucasian) cheeks.  Because in the Oprah-cized USA, victim-hood is power, and feelings are weapons.

The LGBT community will never be satisfied with civil unions now that the “marriage” seed has been planted – which is too bad since a recent Pew Research Center poll showed that a huge majority of Americans approve of allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements that would bestow many of the same rights as married couples.  As a matter of fact, in the past year alone, support for civil unions has grown significantly among folks who oppose same-sex marriage.  Right here in the knuckle-dragging USA.

That sounds like progress to me.  But true to form, gays aren’t likely to give up the drama.

Should lesbians and gays who want to make a home and raise kids be discriminated against from the federal level down?  Of course not.  Should committed gay partners enjoy the same benefits as married heterosexual couples?  Absolutely – and as far as I can tell, in a growing number of states, they do (and if they don’t, trust me, they will).

So why am I defending the Mormons?  To crib from Flip Wilson, the 8MP trailer made me do it (which may indicate how effective the movie will be when it finally opens).  In the meantime, this is America, not Iran – create your own rules, and move on.  And if you really want to get married, nobody’s stopping you from going to Connecticut, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, or Vermont – or to Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, or Wisconsin for the same thing minus the “m” word.

When the day comes that Barack Obama puts down his golf clubs to repeal DOMA – and gay marriage passes by vote in all 57 states - great!  Until then, can’t we all just get along?

There is an extensive body of writing from both sides of the political aisle that has analyzed the extraordinary depths of hatred leveled at former President George W. Bush.

His birth into a wealthy and politically connected family is where a lot of the animus starts. His rejection of his Connecticut roots and adoption of a rugged Texan persona naturally riled his birth-constituency. His disjointed speaking style also alienated many others – especially those who covered him in the Northeastern media. Naturally, some of his initiatives were controversial. His allies say he didn’t do enough.

But all presidents make mistakes, pursue unpopular ideas, possess off-putting personality traits and don’t do enough to appeal to their core supporters. Something far more insidious was at work in the hatred of our most recent former president.

Now that Mr. Bush is quietly going about his retirement, this strain of rage – the GWB43 virus – has spread like wildfire, finding unsuspecting targets, each granting us greater perspective into what not long ago seemed like a mysterious phenomenon isolated only on our 43rd president.

The first person to catch the virus was Sarah Palin, whose family also was infected, including, unforgivably, her children.

Then it was Joe the Plumber, for asking a question.

Next were the Mormons.

Then it was Rush Limbaugh – who hit back.

Next, tax-day “tea party” attendees were “tea bagged.”

Then there was a beauty contestant.

And a Cambridge cop, too.

And now we have town-hall “mobs.”

Smile … you’ve been “community organized.”

When put on the media stage, these individuals and groups have been isolated for destruction for standing in the way of a resurgent modern progressive movement and for challenging its charismatic once-in-a-lifetime standard-bearer, Barack Obama.

This is their time, we’ve been told. And no one is going to stand in the way.

The origins of manufactured “politics of personal destruction” is Saul Alinsky, the mentor of a young Hillary Rodham, who wrote her 92-page Wellesley College senior thesis on the late Chicago-based “progressive” street agitator titled, “There Is Only the Fight.”

Mr. Obama and his Fighting Illini, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have perfected Mr. Alinsky’s techniques as laid out in his guidebook to political warfare, “Rules for Radicals.” In plain language, we see how normal, decent and even private citizens become nationally vilified symbols overnight – all in the pursuit of progressive political victory.

“Rule 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)”

You can read the column in full here.

My pretty fourth-grade teacher, who taught us everything from math and history to a dash of entomology (study of insects), didn’t think so.  One day, unprompted, she told her class of 10-year-olds that she wasn’t really concerned about the Biafran babies because mass starvation was just nature’s way of controlling overpopulation.  (My parents were mortified.)

Margaret Sanger

Hard to fathom how, less than three decades after the Holocaust, any educated person could harbor such cold acceptance of the cruel suffering of fellow human beings - much less voice it (and to children, no less).  But whoever said the human race is on a one-way path to progress?

It’s widely assumed that, in every moment we’re alive, we’ve reached a new pinnacle – of modernity, experience, knowledge, enlightenment – that we always move forward, never back.  But what if we don’t?  What if we’re fated to make the same mistakes (disguised with innocuous new names) over and over again?

Fifty years before my lesson in urban savagery, Margaret Sanger, the Saint of Planned Parenthood, advocated beliefs that were not dissimilar to those of my twisted teach.  The fabled women’s rights activist was all about negative eugenics – meaning making sure ”social misfits” and other undesirables never got the chance to repulse the right people, by making sure they never got born.

“Birth control,” she declared in 1923, “is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, or preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.”  Her mission: to stop ”keeping alive thousands who never, in all human compassion, should have been brought into this world.”

Sanger was ambitious.  She actively advocated for sterilization of the great unwashed – the “feeble-minded, insane… deaf, deformed and dependent,” including “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers.”  Talk about a hard knock life.

Before she came along, President Teddy Roosevelt had responded to a drastic drop in the national birth rate with a more positive (but equally elitist) message.  He encouraged turn-of-the-century yuppies to do their primitive best and reproduce – to, in theory, bring more of the “right” kind of people into the world.  But the goddess of “choice” found hope only in curtailing options for the disenfranchised.

“I hated the wretchedness and hopelessness of the poor,” Sanger wrote, “and never experienced that satisfaction in working among them that so many noble women have found.”  Indeed, her whole life seems to have been spent rebelling against the devout Roman Catholicism of her parents; Sanger’s mother got pregnant a whopping 18 times (which probably explains a lot).

Yes, thanks to Sanger’s one-woman crusade, 8300 people were sterilized in the state of Virginia alone.  Her most famous casualty was a young rape victim named Carrie Buck, whose tubes were ultimately cut – against her will – because she was allegedly promiscuous and mentally “challenged” with a rocky family history.  “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote of the case.  Snip snip.

Betty Friedan

Forty years later, feminist Betty Friedan picked up the Puritanical, less-is-more torch and hailed the American family a “comfortable concentration camp.”  Easy to dismiss such a statement as cheeky rhetoric.  But even in our seemingly advanced society, fascism still seethes just beneath the surface - behind a smile, an empathetic word, a good intention.  People like to control people.

As Paul Johnson points out his absorbing bestseller, Intellectuals, “social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age.  In the twentieth century it has killed scores of millions of innocent people, in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China and elsewhere…. It is the birthright of the totalitarian tradition.”

In the popular countdown, the number one eugenicists were obviously the Nazis, who took social engineering to nightmarish new heights.  But after the post-War baby boom of the 1950s, we got soft – resting on our liberators’ laurels and blindly trusting in the assumption that, as a species, we were finally evolving and growing.

In fact, revolving and shrinking is more like it.  As a good friend once said, “People don’t live long enough to learn anything.”

Gays and lesbians, for instance, were once an invisible minority in America.  In the 1950s, they were labeled mentally ill, often forced to undergo electro-shock therapy or sent off to asylums along with the rest of Sanger’s degenerates.  Yet in 2009, out and proud American LGBTs – exalted and protected by the media and endowed with all the legal rights to form civil unions (and, in some states, marriages) – march naively alongside the covert Stalinists of International ANSWER, whining that they “can’t breathe” in the redneck USA.

Never mind that we live in a country where even the former Republican Vice President – the father of an openly gay daughter - has publicly declared that “People ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”  (Which is a more forthright statement than any the Democratic President has said.)

Meanwhile, in the heterosexual paradise known as Iran, gays who dare to exist (or get caught doing so) continue to be executed, to the tune of about 15 deaths per month – with barely a peep of solidarity from the most powerful and affluent gay community in the Western world.

Recently, violence exploded in Tehran over the rigged re-election of murderous homophobe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  Students and others were inspired by the daring and unusual sight of the opposition candidate – gasp! – holding his wife’s hand in public.  As protesters were bludgeoned and shot in the streets, what did the gay community here do?  They donned green (once upon a time done only on Thursdays), brazenly equated the Iranian riots with their armchair petulance over Obama’s (unsurprising) neglect - and courageously withheld checks from the DNC.

Newsflash: West Hollywood is not Tehran.

And sadly, Mir-Hussein Mousavi ain’t Michael Jackson.  The minute the King of Pop stopped breathing, the gays dumped their Iranian brethren to attack Perez Hilton on Twitter.  A few days later, President Obama officially killed gay solidarity with Iran: he distracted the griping gays with an overdue bone, hosting a Stonewall anniversary party in the East Room of the White House – and proclaimed “June 2009 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month.”  (What about June 2010?)

The LGBT community proved its collective attention span is no better than the average teenager’s.  Riots?  What riots? Memories of atrocities perpetrated against mankind no longer get passed down generation from generation; they end up on T-shirts.  Not even the gay community can remember its darkest days anymore – though God knows, they still love the drama!

As long as there are celebrity train wrecks, oppressed people will remain diversions.  Which makes me wonder: how will gays - or any Americans – react when faced with the next imminent threat?  Deadened by trendy moral relativism, will we even be able to recognize such a thing anymore?

If comfy, urban gays think they can’t “breathe” now, wait until they really start suffocating – not from the widely promoted ”fact” of greenhouse gases, rising seas, and over-population – but from a rapid rise in religious fundamentalism brought on as a direct result of the hardcore secular, anti-family, anti-life legislation most “progressives” support.  The gays will wish they could turn back time and vote for John McCain!

In his book, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity (and What to Do About It), author Phillip Longman presents demographic evidence that over-population is, like global warming, a myth (that the scientific community and the media can’t afford to give up).  Rather than growing, world population is actually shrinking, and at alarming speed - a concept that does not bode well for gays or any other “liberal” minority.

Why?  Because, writes Longman, unless people start having more babies – and fast - ”unsustainable trends end.”  Current global fertility rates are half what they were in 1972.  According to the Census Bureau, by 2050, one out of every five Americans will be over 65.  Imagine the seismic cultural shift Madison Avenue will have to make in order to attract that hot new 55-99 demographic!  You’ve come a long way, granny.

Yet our culture continues to promote endless, sexy images of successful, attractive, single individuals who are always in complete control of their personal choices and surroundings.

“Population growth underlies our modern concept of freedom,” Longman declares.  “Not since the fall of the Roman Empire has the world ever experienced anything on the scale of today’s loss of fertility.”  And when people die off, fundamentalism blossoms – to keep the species going.  Many of the attitudes we associate with the Victorian Era - religious revivalism, moral rigidity, gender role conformity, intolerance of birth control, glorification of motherhood – were actually rooted not in religion, but in demography.

The Industrial Revolution threw people into the cities, where children suddenly became economic burdens and obstacles to upward mobility.   Husbands and wives no longer worked together at home, the number of single women and prostitutes skyrocketed – so late Victorian housewives took it upon themselves to march the streets as moral crusaders for the good of society.

Yes, lesbians and gays (and suburban swingers) can look forward to a whole new generation of PC-resistant Anita Bryant mutations, fighting sin to save the children.  Escalating national debt – check! – and a soon-to-be-massively-overburdened ObamaCare bureaucracy – check! – could help Puritanical thrift and temperance make monstrous comebacks.

Previously gay-friendly friends and neighbors could become more suspicious of “alternate lifestyles,” not because the Bible or the Koran demands it – well, maybe the Koran - but because they would no longer be able to afford the luxury of such conduct.  “Those who reject modernity,” says Longman, ”seem to have an evolutionary advantage, whether they are clean-living Mormons, or Muslims… ”

To quote Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan:  “Have babies – Allah wants it.”

According to the London Times, the number of Muslims living in the UK grew by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone – a growth rate 10 times that of the rest of the country’s population.   And this isn’t by accident.  In Australia, for instance, British-based Sheik Abdul Raheem Green exhorted Muslim couples to have no less than four children each - to ensure that the land down under becomes a pure Islamic state.

Today, there are no less than 85 Shariah courts operating in the UK.  As columnist Peter Whittle recently pointed out in the Telegraph, a ”survey by Policy Exchange… showed that 72 percent of young Muslim men thought that homosexuality should be recriminalised,” reminding that “there are some pretty disturbing things being said by some Imans about what is best for gays, i.e. death.”  (Could it, perchance, be time for American gays to rethink their hostility towards the Mormons?  Just asking.)

So-called “youth gangs,” contemptuous of infidels – that’s us - have made cities all over Europe increasingly dangerous for women, Jews and gays.  The upside is that the rise in gay-bashings by young Muslims has caused many hitherto left-wing Dutch gays to vote conservative by a nearly 2-to-1 margin.

Yet good American progressives continue to shill for a nanny state, willfully ignoring the fact that socialism in Sweden and the Soviet Union failed miserably to maintain even replacement-level fertility rates – never mind the gaping holes a shrinking populace puts in the sails of the environmental windjammer.  What a concept: mankind might actually be part of Mother Gaia, after all; without resorting to killer tax hikes, health care rationing, or concentration camps, we may just destroy ourselves naturally!  So recycle while ye may!

And fasten your seat belts, boys – or start hooking up with some surrogate moms quick.  Because unless we actively try to keep the species going, we’re ushering in what Longman calls “the fundamentalist moment… a fundamentalist future.”  As the saying goes, everything old becomes new again – be it positive eugenics, the Jackson Five, or the Islamic Caliphate.

So the next time you’re up in a plane, looking down at the earth, and you see a bunch of tiny dots moving across the landscape like ants, remember that’s all we are: bugs on a rotating ball.  Mother Nature has a plan for us, and she’s in no hurry to tell us what it is.

In the meantime, don’t get too comfortable, because it only takes a moment to step out of line, fall out of favor – and get smushed.

HBO, of course, apologized for offending Mormons but defended its use of the ceremony because its depiction is “critical” to the show’s story line. Ah, the quintessential non-apology apology, used frequently by politicians: We’re sorry if we offended anyone, but we’re not going to do anything that will actually rectify the situation. Be sure to tune in, though, and boost our ratings!

What I’m more interested in learning, though, is if there are any shows or movies in the works about the “sacred” rite of female genital mutilation – more kindly known as female circumcision – or “honor killings” in Islam. I’d even settle for a program that just depicts a polygamous Muslim family living somewhere in rural America.

I’ll wait. I have plenty of time.

Back in 1997, Law and Order aired an episode about an American man, married to an Egyptian immigrant, who murders the doctor brought over from Egypt by his wife’s family to perform female circumcision on his daughter. That was before 9/11, however, and since then it’s become politically incorrect to say anything unflattering about Islam or Muslims, no matter what the context.

Note that the Church of Latter Day Saints outlawed polygamy back in 1890 while Islam, to my knowledge, has not. Americans were horrified when a rogue Mormon sect not sanctified by the church was discovered in rural Texas and hundreds of children were removed as authorities investigated allegations of abuse and the forced marriage of teen girls to much older men.

But just this week, ABC’s Good Morning America focused on Daad Abdul Rahamn, a Muslim in Dubai, who is getting closer to his goal of fathering 100 children. He’s only supposed to have four wives at a time, but “he has had 17 and is looking for more.” Diane Sawyer practically swooned in wonderment. (Maybe she’s thinking of applying to be the next Mrs. Rahamn?) But perhaps this case is different because the local sheikh approves and Rahamn is not ashamed to accept the sheikh’s handouts to help finance his growing family. Liberals love socialism in any shape or form.

And yes, I know Good Morning America is officially under ABC’s news division, but how many people actually watch it for its contributions to serious news?

Remember when South Park aired its now-infamous Scientology episode that not only skewered top dog Scientologist Tom Cruise but the depicted the “sacred beliefs” of the religion started by second-rate science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard and followed by a growing number of Hollywood glitterati? Comedy Central pulled the episode from its initial rerun schedule because of pressure from Cruise, although it did end up rerunning it later in the season. But that wasn’t the only fallout. The late Isaac Hayes, who voiced the character Chef and was a Scientologist, quit the show in protest of its “intolerance and bigotry towards religious rights of others.” Show co-creator Matt Stone responded by saying Hayes had “no problem – and he’s cashed plenty of checks – with our show making fun of Christians.”

I guess it doesn’t pay to annoy the wrong people.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the leftist entertainment industry has no qualms about airing what is supposed to be a sacred Mormon ritual on television because Mormons are not on the list of protected victim groups. Don’t believe me? Remember what Mitt Romney had to endure during the last presidential election regarding his religion. I’m not suggesting that production companies avoid producing entertainment that negatively focuses on a particular religion because its followers might be offended. However, I am offended by the double standard that means certain groups are considered fair game while others are left alone in the name of “multicultural sensitivity.”

In a fiscal conservative’s utopian dreamworld, there would be no federal funding for the arts (or so many other government agencies or programs for that matter).  This has been our position since the inception of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in the early 1970’s.  We’ve been saying that if elected, we would abolish these misguided programs and departments and bring our government back to the bare-bones constitutionally described role that it has and leave everything else to the states.

We’ve held the influential bully pulpit of the presidency for twenty of the past twenty-eight years, and what has happened to the NEA?  It has grown.  While we have stood on principle,  we have also stood on the sidelines.  The founding fathers would be outraged that the federal government is funding art with taxpayer money, but because we are on the sidelines standing on our principles, all of that money is going to the people creating art with messages that undermine our very existence.

But, I will also say that as long as the NEA exists, and as long as art is to receive funding by the government, we conservatives are on the wrong side of the argument.  There is no way to combat the perception that we are “anti-art” or in favor of closing down the local museum by taking away its funding.  I know, there ARE logical arguments to combat that perception, but again I ask:  How have those arguments been working out for us?

The “Fairness Doctrine” for arts funding.

At the risk of enraging my fellow conservatives and all of you libertarians, I propose that we re-think our position on the NEA given the realities of the past 35 years.  The NEA is here and it’s not going anywhere in the near future.  And instead of ceding the cultural ground in our country to the leftist voices and artists who have won the lion’s share of all of that funding over the past three decades, it is time for conservatives to get our asses into the game.  It’s time for a “fairness doctrine” of sorts when it comes to arts funding.

It’s the stated policy of the NEA to not discriminate due to the content of the art, so I say we make them put OUR money where their mouth is: Start doling out grants to playwrights and organizations who speak to so many Americans who are disenfranchised at the theatre.

The ESTABLISHMENT is the vast network of institutional theatres who have been living high on the hog in their publicly owned “Performing Arts Centers” or “Civic Theatre Complex” and managing their multi-million-dollar budgets under the guise of the altruistic and benign mission statement of “Bringing theatre to the community.”  The Lincoln Center Theatre and The Public Theatre and the Center Theatre Group and the Seattle Rep and The Arena Stage and the Goodman theatre… those guys are “The Man” and I’m tired of “The Man” keeping my people down!

A few decades ago, there was a perceived crisis in the American Theatre for the lack of “voices” from black playwrights, Asian playwrights, female playwrights, Latino playwrights and gay playwrights. Almost every single college and major non-profit theatre dutifully set up specific, targeted programs to nurture these playwrights from these target groups, in the name of diversity.

Well my friends… what voices are missing in non-profit, regional theatres today?  OURS!  We need to demand a full-throated, passionate and intelligent depiction of the conservative “experience” in America.  Also, don’t tell me that a revival of “Carousel” counts as a production reflecting “traditional American values.”  The crises the theatre community in America faces today is not that there are not enough revivals.

The Audience is staying home.

Go back and look at the comments from my first post on this subject.  You will hear from many people who say they are no longer going to the theatre.  And, unlike the conventional wisdom we’ve been hearing at non-profit regional theatres for the past thirty years, it is NOT because of a lack of arts education in the schools.  It is NOT because theatre is too inaccessible.  The people are choosing not to go to the theatre because of WHAT is being produced.  Because, believe it or not, my liberal friends, an adult person does not like to spend over $50 to sit in the dark and get yelled at or called names for two hours.

Unlike any other business, the theatre people who inhabit your local non-profit regional theatre do not look at their PRODUCT and wonder why people are not buying it.  They first wonder what is wrong with YOU.  I wonder how many folks in that regional theatre in your downtown actually reflect on the content of the plays they are producing and wonder if perhaps the answer to their “audience development” needs lies in the simple fact that about half of the people who live in their area are not interested in hearing the preaching contained within the stories they are telling, no matter how talented the people are in telling them.

For those of you who still find yourselves patronizing the regional non-profit in the major metropolis near your home, I bet you experience something like this:  You get to your seat and open your program and three or four pieces of paper fly out.  One is an envelope suitable for a donation.  One is a letter from the development department or artistic director decrying the current state of funding for the arts.  Maybe it mentions that audiences are declining because of the lack of arts in the schools.  Another sheet is a survey they want you to fill out (they never give you a pen or pencil).  The survey asks questions about your race and age and income and TV or film habits.  You look around…. all of these pieces of paper are littered about the floor under the seats around you.  Clearly part of the theatre’s green initiative.

Then the house lights dim to half and the excitement builds, it’s curtain time… get ready for the magic of theatre…  I love the excitement of that moment, here comes the…. pre-show curtain speech?  Oh no!  The artistic director or a board member or someone from the theatre staff bounds onto the stage and starts the spiel.  First, they describe all of the items that just dropped out of your program and they beg you to read them, fill them out and stick a check in them.  These days they throw in a line like: “Thankfully, we now have a president dedicated to supporting the arts and theatre, but we still need …. blah blah blah” – It never occurs to these folks that half of the people in the seats didn’t vote for President Obama.  And they often say in their speech some patronizing line like, “We are your theatre, we are a part of this community, we want to hear from you, please give us your feedback, theatre is a living breathing art form and your participation is vital to our growth…”

But, I have a secret to reveal to you:  They don’t really think that.  Oh, they want you to participate, by subscribing and donating, but it ends there.  If you want to meet with someone and express your distaste with the artistic choices, good luck.  If you want to complain that too often they bring left-wing politics onto the stage, you’re given lip service.  Send a letter asking for an uplifting play that reflects the good in America or perhaps the heroic deeds of our military or perhaps a play reflecting on the negative consequences of the misogyny and patriarchy in the hip-hop culture, and the letter will be treated as a joke from a right-wing wacko bigot.  Sometimes the letter is shown around the office and laughed at.  They don’t really want to hear from you unless you are calling to make a donation or to tell them how great they are.

If it ever crosses the minds of the artistic decision makers at the major non-profit regional theatres that there may be something about the content of their plays that is negatively affecting their subscriptions or their single-ticket sales, they never consider that it might have to do with the overall message or themes of their plays.  They think it’s because they are choosing plays that are risky or edgy and the older, conservative folks out there are just not ready or sophisticated enough to appreciate it.  And then they dig in and take an artistic stand.  But the problem with the plays has more to do with the themes and the political message they are trying to communicate, not with the edgy characters or nudity or cursing.

Example:  A theatre produces “Angels in America” and receives complaint letters about the content.  The powers that be at the theatre write it off to homophobia or gay-bashing or just some intolerance from the religious right and they are emboldened with the knowledge that they have made a bold artistic choice and brought this fresh and daring message to their community.  But the objection to “Angels in America” that I have and that I’ve heard from others is not that it is fresh or daring, it’s that it’s the same old “Reagan did nothing about AIDS” and “Ray Cohn was an evil closet-case hypocrite” and “Mormons are repressed homophobes” kind of story that we’ve been hearing for years.

But, what if a theatre commissioned a play about the life of the heroic writer Randy Shilts?  Shilts was an openly gay journalist who wrote “And The Band Played On” which chronicled the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco.  He rightly campaigned for the closing of gay bath houses as a logical way to help stop the spread of HIV and he was very vocal in his opposition of the trend to “out” prominent but closeted gay and lesbian actors and politicians.  For his efforts he was spat upon on Castro Street.  Bob Ross, editor and publisher of the Bay Area Reporter, described Shilts as a traitor to his own kind.  This would be a play that deals with the same subject matter as “Angels” but it would take a different political perspective.  Most of those conservatives complaining about “Angels” would not complain about this play, I guarantee you that the vast number of complaints would come from the LGBT community and GLAAD and all of those other acronym agencies paid to say the same thing.

Trouble is, this play does not exist.  Nor does a play exist about the fall of the Berlin Wall, the single most significant international event in the past fifty years.  Nor does a play exist about the heroism of our military fighting in Iraq, or about the negative repercussions of abortion in America over the past thirty years.  Nor is there a play written in the past twenty years in America showing a member of the Catholic clergy in an unambiguously positive light (unless a drunk priest is there for comic effect).  These plays don’t exist because the environment in the artistic corridors are not interested in telling these stories.

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I promised a solution to this problem in my last post, and I have a few humble suggestions.  I’m looking forward to the next round of comments, e-mails, and Facebook messages with your ideas:

A Modest Proposal

I maintain that at the root of this problem is a problem of equal employment.

I remember attending a symposium where a bunch of theatre professionals were getting together to talk about how to get a new audience or keep their existing audience and it was all about educational programs and free tix for children and adding more writing programs for African-American playwrights and I wanted to get up on the stage and say:  “Please stand up if you voted Democrat in the last presidential election”…  I had no doubt most of the room would stand up… Then I would say… “Look around you… the last presidential election (it was Bush/Gore) was almost exactly 50/50.  Now, one of two things is happening here… either your organizations are not ideologically inclusive  and that is reflected in your programming and how you represent yourself to your community of ticket-buyers, or some of you are afraid to sit down right now and reveal yourselves as Republicans… either way, we have a BIG problem!”

How can we truthfully say that we are a part of a community and we reflect the sensibilities and tell stories that emotionally move the members of that community when our organizations are staffed with people whose views only reflect half of the community?  We can’t, and we don’t.  And the results are affecting the bottom line.

Theatres should consider creating a special position, an “ombudsman,” who speaks for that 50% who might have a problem with the message the theatre is putting out.  They can also respectfully and sensitively respond to the complaints that might come in and then actually communicate those complaints effectively to the powers that be at the organization.  They could also set up after-show dialogues with the writers and encourage people to voice their annoyance at the preaching they are receiving from the stage.  I guarantee you that after about a year after the silently suffering patrons are empowered, programming changes will begin to take effect.

Another crucial role for the “ombudsman” would be to solicit plays from a conservative point of view, identify a handful of them that are worthy of development and work with those playwrights to have, at the very least, a main-stage staged reading open to the public so that the artistic decision makers could actually see these plays up on their feet and in front of an audience.  Put them in the position where they must justify why they are not producing these plays so we no longer hear quotes like this:

André Bishop, artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater for 16 years, said he reads about five plays a week, and from thousands over the years he could not think of a single one that would fall on the right end of the spectrum. “I’m trying to think if I ever read a play that I would call conservative,” he said, pausing a few moments. “I don’t think I’ve come across one.”

Mr. Bishop, if you agree that this is a problem, hire someone to actively find and nurture these plays.  If you had gone two decades without ever seeing a gay play or a black play or a Latino play or a feminist play it would not have been acceptable.  So, now what are you going to do about us conservatives?

The Artistic Director and the Board President should introduce this conservative watchdog with their arms around him saying “this is our guy and a valuable member of this team.”  The Jackie Robinson of conservative theatre could emerge hence.

The above concept is modest because it really amounts to token change, but, it’s more than we have now and it’s pretty easy to achieve.  The ideal situation would be to achieve a little more than just an evening of staged readings with the hope of getting a full production.  Ideally, the plays in question would be developed and mounted in full production from the get go.

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So, beyond my “Modest Proposal” I also have a “Not-So-Modest Proposal” and I have “A Guargantuan Proposal.”  Looks like there’s gonna be a Part 3!

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