When Hillary Rodham Clinton, now a senator from New York but then the nation’s first lady, issued a book called “It Takes a Village,” various right-thinkers complained about its thesis. The title came from an African proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and the critics said this was wrong: Families, not villages, raise children in this country.
While there is merit in that criticism, it does seem odd that certain right-thinkers have been trying to transfer some child-rearing responsibilities from parents to the “village” – that is, society at large.
That came up last week when the Senate Commerce Committee held a day-long forum on indecency in cable and satellite television programming. Currently, there are federal standards for regular broadcast television, but not for cable and satellite, where the Federal Communications Commission does not have the authority – but Congress could grant that power to the FCC.
Programs with sex and obscenity should be limited to adult viewers, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said, and, “Parents need better and more tools to help them navigate the entertainment waters, particularly on cable and satellite TV.” And the Christian Coalition wants to increase the fine for indecent broadcasting from $32,500 to $500,000 per incident.
If some juvenile psyches are tainted by exposure to something on TV, isn’t it the parents’ job to protect their children?
Note that the First Amendment to the federal constitution says, “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” That seems pretty clear: No law. There is no exception for the protection of youthful eyes and ears. Congress seems to be exceeding its constitutional powers even to consider decency provisions.
To move on, I must confess that I don’t spend much time shopping for television sets. The one we have now works fine. So I might have missed something new in the electronics department, but to date, every TV set I’ve seen has an off switch and a channel changer. And many of these can be programmed to allow only certain channels, so parents can limit what their children watch.
However, the FCC’s Martin told Congress, “You can always turn the television off and of course block the channels you don’t want, but why should you have to?”
Now we’re getting to the real issue. Martin is perfectly capable of customizing his family’s TV fare, but he’s too lazy. He wants the government to do it for him.
As for all those right-thinking parents, many of them the same folks who mocked the “it takes a village” adage, they must be too busy to keep track of what their children watch. Or perhaps they hate being around their children, and want to be able to shunt them off to a separate room with their own TV sets. They want an electronic babysitter. They want the “village” to raise their children.
And there’s another problem with federal standards – whose standards should apply?
Years ago, I read bedtime stories to our daughters. To keep from getting bored myself, I looked for material of some literary merit, like E.B. White (“Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little,” “The Trumpet of the Swan”), Homer and Virgil. A friend suggested “The Chronicles of Narnia” series by C.S. Lewis, and they were good reading, up to a point.
The point came when the characters Lucy and Susan, approximately the same age as our daughters then, were not allowed to join the boys in a battle, just because they were girls. I started to explain that the books were written back in the 1950s, when people thought differently.
Eventually I decided that I really didn’t want my daughters to hear anyone say that there was something they couldn’t do just because they were girls. This, after all, was not some ancient epic like the Iliad, which underlies Western literature even if it is sexist. It was a relatively modern fantasy. So I found something else for their bedtime stories.
Other parents might have made a different decision. And that’s the point. It’s a parental decision, not a “village” decision or an FCC decision. And if some parents are too lazy to do their jobs, why does that mean that my choices of television programming should be limited? Why not tell them to be with their kids, instead of pestering the FCC and Congress?
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
