NORMAN
LEAR
When
Boston’s historic Ford Hall Forum presented its annual
First Amendment Award to Norman Lear, the television producer
noted for such hits as “All in the Family” and
“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” it was celebrating
his critical role in the founding of People For the American
Way in 1980. PFAW is group of civic and religious leaders
united to fight against the rising tide of intolerance and
social discord and to affirm “respect for diversity;
freedom of thought, expression, and religion; equal justice;
and a sense of community.” People For the American
Way, now with 300,000 members is at 2000 M Street, NW, Washington,
DC 20036. Its “Right Wing Watch" lists headlines
from the Right Wing regarding media, education, health,
and separation of church and state.
Norman
Lear is currently involved in the Declaration of Independence
Road Trip, a nonprofit, nonpartisan project that takes an
original copy of the Declaration of Independence on a three-and-a-half-year,
cross-country tour. The goal of the project is to bring
the "People's Document" directly to all Americans—especially
young people—to inspire them to see citizenship as
an opportunity to participate in civic life, to exercise
their rights, and above all, to vote.
This
article is abridged from Speak Out Against the New Right
edited by Herbert F. Vetter (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1982)
I
am honored to be receiving this First Amendment Award from
the Ford Hall Forum and to follow the distinguished men
and women who have been honored here.
I love being associated with the First Amendment. I treasure
the words from the Declaration of Independence: "We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness." Terrific words—precise;
impeccable—I love them.
And the First Amendment itself: "Congress shall make
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to
assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of
grievances."
John Stuart Mill believed that literature and morality should
enjoy competitive coexistence. Literature, the vehicle of
ideas, must be unrestricted by the political, religious,
or moral dictates of the controlling group of the day. There
can be no freedom of expression in the full sense, Mill
said, unless all facets of life can be portrayed, no matter
how repulsive the disclosures may be to some people. “Those
who desire to suppress an opinion deny its truth,”
Mill continued, “but they are not infallible.”
And every generation must deal with its own Infallibles.
In the 1950's, Joe McCarthy considered himself an Infallible.
To challenge his thinking or his methods was to be tagged
immediately with being soft on Communism. Today, the self-styled
Infallibles are known as the Religious New Right, or the
Christian New Right. To disagree with their conclusions
on numerous matters of morality and politics is to be labeled
a poor Christian, or unpatriotic, or anti-family.
The Christian Roundtable says: "The Constitution was
designed to perpetuate a Christian order." And the
Committee for a Free Congress says: "We're working
to overturn the present power structure in this country.
We are talking about the Christianizing of America."
According to reports, there are now more than 1,300 Christian
radio stations broadcasting religious programming—with
one new station being added each week; there are some 40
independent Christian television stations with a full-time
diet of religious programming; and two Christian broadcasting
networks—largely fundamentalist. There are "superstars"
among television evangelicals—many of them taking in
more than $1,000,000 a week from their direct solicitations
and the sale of religious merchandise. There are also scores
and scores of local television and radio evangelicals—blanketing
the country—espousing the same far-right, fundamentalist
points of view—while attacking the integrity and the
character of anyone who does not stand with them.
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It
is estimated that the electronic church attracts 130,000,000
viewers and listeners a week. According to the Gallup Poll,
that is more people than go to church. Then there are the
millions of pieces of computerized mail that are pumped,
weekly, into homes across the nation by the ultraright organizations
that are their secular counterparts. In the name of these
organizations—and in ad hoc organizations without names—let's
look at what else is going on at the local level across
the country:
The American Library Association reports that libraries
in some 30 states are being pressured to remove as many
as 132 titles and authors from library shelves. They include
John Steinbeck (Grapes of Wrath), Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse
Five), Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), George
Orwell (1984), Bernard Malamud (The Fixer),
and J.D. Salinger, who had the temerity to write Catcher
in the Rye. In many states, librarians are being taken
to court by groups seeking the names of people who had taken
certain books out on loan. On television news broadcasts
we have seen the spectre of bookburning in Indiana and Louisiana.
And textbooks across the country are not being bought by
some school boards—under pressure from local groups—until
all "liberal dogma and secular humanism" have
been excised.
In response to all of this, I hasten to say—and this
is both the pain and the glory of the First Amendment—that
these leaders and organizations have every First Amendment
right to express themselves as they wish. But if we agree
that the American experiment is based on the conviction
that a healthy society is best maintained not by an attempt
to impose uniformity, but through a free and open interchange
of differing opinions, then the dogma of the Religious New
Right violates the spirit of the First Amendment—and
the spirit of liberty.
I have listened for years as the Moral Majority mindset
has offered these issues as an explanation for all the country’s
ills. It is not difficult to understand how the current,
self-appointed Infallibles have grown so strong as to threaten
the spirit of liberty for this generation. Throughout history,
in times of hardship, voices of stridency and division have
replaced those of reason and unity. The results are a tension
among races, classes, and religions; a deterioration of
free and open dialogue; and the temptation to grasp at simplistic
solutions for complex problems.
In our time of hardship, it is the Moral Majority mind-set
that feeds on the deep and valid concerns of Americans.
There is widespread feeling today that our society is seriously
flawed. With the mounting concern over nuclear proliferation
and the potential for nuclear holocaust our people are more
frustrated, anxious and fearful than at any other time in
our history.
Responding to this time of crisis is the Religious New Right
with its simplistic solutions to our most complex problems.
We have lost our way, they say, because we have turned our
backs on God and followed the devices and desires of our
own hearts—and America's purity and strength can be
restored only if the nation submits to the political and
moral answers which they see as self-evident. There follow
positions on the issues they feel are destroying the American
family: the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion, sex education,
prayer in school, gay rights, and others.
I have listened as the Moral Majority mind-set has offered
these issues as an explanation for all the country's ills.
I disagree and helped to form an association with the leaders
of most of America's mainline churches. We formed People
For the American Way and worked through our agenda. In the
marketplace of ideas, our adversaries do us a very big favor.
They force us to think through, to reappraise, to hone,
and ultimately to strengthen our own convictions. In that
spirit, I would like to tell you where I stand.
I believe in God. And I was born a Jew. Therefore I am unable
to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. I heard Jerry Falwell
on his "Old Time Gospel Hour" tell an estimated
20,000,000 viewers that only those people who accept Jesus
Christ as their savior will go to heaven, and that all others
will roast for an eternity in hell. With all respect to
Falwell and his interpretation of scripture, I don't believe
that my spending eternity impaled on a spit is necessarily
a fait accompli.
No, I think God placed Christians and Jews and Buddhists
and Moslems and other religions on this earth (the Encyclopedia
of American Religions lists 1,200 practicing religions in
this country alone); I think God placed them here because
He wanted them here. Maybe because He knew He would be bored
to tears if 4,500,000,000 people worshiped Him in exactly
the same way.
As to what may be the root cause of some of our most serious
concerns, my sense of things tells me that the problems
America faces are not a consequence of the women's movement,
or the fact the gays have come out of their closets and
wish to take prideful places in American life, or that sex
education is taught in some public schools, or that children
may pray privately and individually in school or out of
school, but not in school as a matter of law.
To me, the most destructive societal disease of our time,
and the biggest reason for the decline of public morality
and ethics, is American leadership's fixation with what
has come to be known as the bottom line. Whether it is in
industry, government, or academia, leadership everywhere
seems to be all too ready to sell the future short for a
moment of success. We are observing a growing misuse of
human potential for short-term gain at the expense of all
of our tomorrows.
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Because
of its high profile, my industry—television—is
a prime example of this destructive phenomenon. Fanned by
the daily press—which operates on its own bottom line—the
fires of competition between the networks have resulted
in an unparalleled and hysterical competition for ratings—ratings
which translate to profits. I've talked to many television
programming executives who are trapped in this rating war,
and who wish things were different. The network programmers
are trapped in the system for short-term gain, and they
know they will have to pay for it in the long term.
As if all the new technology were not threatening enough,
they're under daily attack by a ton of organizations for
the taste and the quality and the unoriginality of their
programming. Yet they go on, blithely pandering with anything
they can put together for that high rating and the profit
statement that follows.
"It's suicidal," says one. "If everyone at
the network were to stand in a big circle and slash each
other's throats, we wouldn't be expressing a death wish
better than the way we're going now. You might think we
would learn a lesson from the three motor companies.
The New York Times recently reported that America's
business leaders are so obsessed with short-term gain that,
in an almost total preoccupation with quarter-to-quarter
profits comparisons, more and more contracts for chief executive
officers call for bonuses tied to short-term performance.
There are situations when this obsession with the bottom
line affects more than profits and jobs. The Food and Drug
Administration, for example, has banned several pesticides
because scientific research has established that they do
chemical harm to the body. But the companies manufacturing
the pesticides have a big investment in them, so rather
than discontinue their manufacture, they have been exporting
them. But the irony is that these pesticides are purchased
and used overseas by large multinational corporations—most
of them American corporations. The outlawed chemicals then
find their way into foods prepared abroad by these American
companies—foods which are shipped back home to be sold
in the United States. Last year, Americans bought 600 food
commodities—worth more than $13,000,000,000—that
contained the restricted pesticides.
America is strangling on its obsession with the bottom line.
We have created a climate of opportunism in our country
in which this obsession thrives, and all of us in leadership
positions—as parents, teachers, employers—control
our part of that climate.
But the master thermostats are in the Congress, and in the
room with the greatest potential for educating us all: the
Oval Office. My hope is that one day there will be sufficient
members of the Congress—and perhaps an occupant of
the Oval Office—who will find these thermostats and
begin to adjust the climate by telling us what we need to
hear: that in this country the individual still matters.
I like living in a country where I can speak out. I like
the First Amendment. I like pluralism. I like diversity.
And I like the flag; it is not the exclusive property of
the far right. Call me a liberal, or a moderate, or a progressive—I
think I'm a bleeding-heart conservative—but it's my
flag too. It is more than a symbol of America's might. It
is a symbol of America's people. Fifty stars stand for more
than fifty gun boats; they stand for fifty states—and
that's us.
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