Accessible Airwaves

Once again, the United Church of Christ's inclusion-themed, 30-second TV commercial has been rejected by the broadcast networks and now cable network, Viacom.

The United Church of Christ's all-inclusive message has been deemed "too controversial."

It’s time for equal access.

1. Let Your Voice Be Heard - Send a Message to Viacom Viacom accepts ads laced with sexual innuendo, greed, violence, and the politics of personal destruction, while our message of openness and welcome is not allowed. Tell Viacom to make the airwaves accessible. 2. Tell Your Friends Broadcasters who use the public airwaves have a responsibility to operate in the public interest. Spread the word about our campaign!

March 18, 2005

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James Dobson Doesn't Speak For Me
Posted by The Rev. Bob Chase, 3/18/2005 03:31:00 PM

The following, reported by Religion News Service, more than caught my attention. It made me angry:

"Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group, is praising the removal of references to sexual orientation from materials accompanying a children's video starring SpongeBob SquarePants and about 100 other television characters."
(full story)

Can this be true? The We Are Family Foundation denies that pressure caused them to drop references to sexual orientation from the video's support materials, citing instead their desire to "shorten the guide." This would be almost amusing, if it weren't so tragic. Today's taunts often involve sexual orientation, like when I was growing up they involved religion, race or ethnicity. Of all references to tolerance, why would these be dropped?

What is really appalling about Focus on the Family's stance is that it is not only anti-gay, but also anti-family and anti-children. The purpose of these resources is to promote tolerance among children who, lest we forget, don't choose their parents. By eliminating this category in the need for tolerance in peer-to-peer relationships, aren't we signaling that it's okay—even justified—to engage in bigoted behavior towards more than one million children of gay parents under the age of eighteen?

The Rev. John H. Thomas, the UCC's General Minister and President, says it well:

"It is a sad day when Focus on the Family, a group claiming to speak for Christians in America, finds reason to celebrate assaults on tolerance in the name of its own version of family values. For Focus on the Family to bully groups like the We Are Family Foundation because of their efforts to teach children about respect for those who are different only leads to bullying on the playground. What's Christian - or American - about that?" (full story)

The Rev. John H. Thomas, general minister and president of the UCC, welcomes SpongeBob Squarepants to the UCC's national offices in Cleveland. [January 2005] Randy Varcho/UCC Photo

Focus on the Family should be ashamed of its wanton gloating at the expense of a safer environment for so many of our nation's children. I believe that those of us who are really concerned about a safe environment for our children say "ENOUGH" to those who would put our children's well being at risk for their own narrow political agenda.

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March 11, 2005

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Bloggers Come Through Again
Posted by The Rev. Bob Chase, 3/11/2005 09:13:00 AM

While the UCC has received some great feedback throughout the blogoshere for our blogad campaign, such as comments on oliverwillis.com, Henry at Blogads and a great post by David Corn, I have been particularly moved by the bloggers that came knocking on our door asking to run the ad for free on their websites.

The first the requests came from bloggers within the UCC family, including Chuck Currie, a UCC Seminarian who blogs at http://chuckcurrie.blogs.com/chuck_currie and Pastordan a UCC minister who blogs at http://www.faithforward.blogspot.com.

At the urging of these bloggers and Roger Harkness who posted a comment that he would like to post it to his blog at http://okcitykid.bravejournal.com we went ahead and created a page for bloggers to copy the code and add the blog to their sites.

Since then we have seen the ad starting to appear throughout the blogosphere from blogs such as http://www.squirrelly.org , http://hereatmydesk.blogspot.com, http://bloohoo.blogspot.com and http://spronk.blogspot.com.

Thank you, thank you and thank you. It is exciting to be a part of what David Corn calls this "historic blog campaign." Those who seek to control the airwaves have a whole new force to contend with! And, as the saying goes, "may the force be with you."


Blessings,

Bob
The Rev. Robert Chase
Director of Communication
United Church of Christ

ps - To add the ad to your own site visit http://www.accessibleairwaves.org/blogad.html

Permanent Link  [ ]

March 8, 2005

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When the Old Media said NO the Blogs said YES
Posted by The Rev. Bob Chase, 3/08/2005 09:30:00 AM

Last December, although I had heard of the blogosphere, I had no idea of its power and influence. Then, the United Church of Christ tried to place an ad on CBS and NBC. Our message of extravagant welcome was rejected for being “too controversial.” I was outraged by this abuse of power by the networks. How else could we get our word to the people?

Enter the bloggers, who recognized the absurdity of the networks allowing ads that feature half-naked women mud wrestling and former presidential candidates talking about penile dysfunction, but who find the notion of a church welcoming all people to be too threatening. Bloggers such as John Aravosis at AmericaBlog and Chris Bowers at MyDD picked up the story and gave it legs. I've come to admire bloggers' passion and willingness to tackle out of the box issues that haven't yet been framed by traditional media. After talking with some bloggers, we decided to follow their example and launched http://accessibleairwaves.org to tap into the passion and energy of the blogosphere.

I believe this is the next great revolution in journalism. In the tradition of this nation’s earliest pamphleteers, bloggers are sharing news and information as a mark of a truly free society, not as something that can be controlled and manipulated by multi-national corporations.

So when we started to consider the next round of advertising, blogs seemed like a obvious choice. True to form, CBS and NBC again rejected our ad. While we will continue our campaign to pressure the FCC to enforce the public interest obligations of broadcasters, we are not going to let the networks stop us from getting our message to the public. It seemed only natural to embrace the blogs to get the message out since the blogs helped bring our message to light in December.

So starting today and for the next several weeks, we are running our ad on over 50 of the top blogs. I hope that our message, “No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome at the United Church of Christ” resonates on the blogs and helps get the word out to both the traditional media and the public at large.

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March 4, 2005

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Back to the UCC
Posted by henrycopeland, 3/04/2005 04:01:00 PM

When we lived in Amherst, MA, my wife, children and I attended the South Congregational Church. We loved the unpretentious preaching, the entwined lives of young and old members, the bustling coffee hour after church.

When we moved to Chapel Hill two years ago, one of our chief regrets was leaving that church behind. It had felt like home. Since then, we've ricocheted among churches -- Presbyterian, Universalist, Methodist. Alternatively pompous, diffuse or unsociable, they all made us uncomfortable. We fell into the habit of walking the dog on Sunday mornings.

About six weeks ago when the UCC began considering advertising on blogs, I got to see a draft version of the UCC's online Flash ad, the one that shows people being turned away from a church's steps. Though the metaphor was extreme, it spoke a poetic truth. Who wrote homogeneity into the scriptures? And doesn't the practice of church-as-a-post-college-fraternity subvert Christ's message?

So I did some Googling and found the United Church of Chapel Hill's web-site. We attended a service. Walking through the door into the bustling, laid-back entrance hall gave me an odd tingle. The plain-spoken sermon, the chatter-filled coffee hour, the light, unadorned building, the engagement in broader social concerns, and, as advertised, the congregation's diversity -- all amplified that tingle.

After we attended a second service, Richard Edens, the minister, struck up a conversation. I told him we'd moved from Amherst and had been frustrated since leaving South Congregational. He explained the UCC kinship between the Amherst and Chapel hill churches. I was stunned. We were home again.

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Blog Archives:

12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004
01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005
02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005
03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005
05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005
03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006
04/01/2006 - 04/30/2006

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About OC Inc.

The Office of Communication of the United Church of Christ, Inc. is the media advocacy arm of the United Church of Christ, a mainline Protestant denomination of over 1.3 million members. The United Church of Christ was the first voice to demand that broadcasters who use the public airwaves have a responsibility to operate in the public interest. In the 1960s, the United Church of Christ earned its place in U.S. broadcasting history by successfully challenging the license of WLBT-TV in Jackson, Miss, for refusing to broadcast news and information about African Americans.