Ooh snap!, both Rush Limbaugh and Kirk Cameron can make a usually non-politicking but opinionated gal pop a sugarcoated Advil off-cycle. Now that the Twittersphere and beyond fervor surrounding their respective anti-women, anti-gay but unified anti-sex messages has subsided an iota, I was faced with a very angry friend’s Wrath of Kan You Believe That S**t?!@*#$%?! delayed reaction.
Since I’d just conveniently got my old Underdog U cheerleading outfit back from the cleaners, at first, I was all high kicks and hoots egging her (a woman with active gonads and a gay brother) on. But then—and I don’t know if it was just that her third Whatever-tini kicked in, or if her more deeply seeded anger than I blissfully ever knew lay in deadly silence waiting to angrily attack! from under her benign surface errupted—off she went…too far. She lumped the two Big Mouths together! She started overlapping and confusing their comments. Oh yes she did.
But there is a Rush-said, Kirk-said difference.
And the difference in their judgmental messages of intolerance is that Rush did it for pure promotion and to fan the flames of the innate fear of his audience’s lust for How Things Were—you know, a straight-up old fashioned, rally-the-troops-in-an-election-year PR stunt—and that Kirk Cameron is a true believer (sorry, no caps. The Editor). He walks his talk and actually raises his kids to believe his brand of Old Testy biblical-ity and its fire and brimstone No No-isms. And while I can’t agree one scintilla with his beliefs, we’re both American through and through, and so I have and want to defend his right to say it.
Rush’s story on the other hand, post-snowballing of lemming sponsor-dropping, PCesque Growing Pains cast distancing (and two weeks later and I’m still quoting Bill Maher’s, “He’s been married four times and still no kids. Why? Because he’s the birth control.”) is now picked up as the Freedom of Speech flag. Wrong! And by whom, but no other than my buddy Bill Maher protecting Rush as the poster boy of victimhood. But Maher’s just wrong (about this; I totally agree that Limbaugh = birthcontrol).
An old complex issue, made more twisty, turny than a pretzel with the addition of immediate reaction time of social media, which amps up a brighter spotlight on sponsors and their associated politics of profit margin.
What do you think?
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