To the Editor of the San Diego Union Tribune,
The comic strip “Opus” by Berkeley Breathed should be discontinued immediately.
This Sunday’s strip depicted three characters talking about a child of their acquaintance with two mothers. They speculate “Makes you wonder how he’ll do without a male role model in the house.” The visual answer to that an angry, inebriated, misogynist father throwing a TV out the window and swearing at the baseball player.
The comic should be pulled immediately, for these reasons.
1. It wasn’t funny.
2. It was mean.
3. It was anti-male, anti-father hate speech. If you doubt that, imagine if the images had been reversed: an innocent white male married father confronts an unattractive out of control gay person. The Human Rights Campaign would go ballistic. In my opinion, this comic is reason enough for happily married women to go ballistic at the intentional assault on their husbands.
4. It was in extremely poor taste to run an anti-father cartoon the week before Fathers Day.
Sincerely,
Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Attack on Fathers on the Comic Page
I just wrote the following letter to the editor of my newspaper. I hope others will do so as well. I will blog more about this later. Dr J
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6 comments:
Your problem, as I see it, is that you think deeply--even on a comic strip. This can lead you to conclusions of which the American public would remain unaware.
America's blessing, as I see it, is that, if they look around a bit, they can find writers such as yourself who can point out to them the obvious aspects they missed.
Bless you! Your family is indeed fortunate for your compassionate understanding. And American benefits from your bold publications.
Happy Dae
http://www.ShoeStringGenealogy.com/ssg1.htm
Ms. Morse: You have to understand the context of the characters. This is how Steve Dallas is written -- as a jerk. This isn't meant to speak for fathers everywhere, just for the situation between Steve and his son Auggie (the black-haired boy):
http://www.goodasyou.org/good_as_you/2007/06/lash_out_now_as.html
I'm sorry, did I just hallucinate? Did you actually write a letter to the paper complaining about Opus? Call me crazy, but I think you overshot that one by an incredibly long mile.
Seriously, I think your knee-jerk reaction comes from the fact that you don't like gay people. If there wasn't a discussion about two moms, this would have been barely a blip on your radar screen. Perhaps you could use the same advise my mother gave me after I shot off my mouth - "think before you hit the send button!"
Blessings!
j.
Dr. Morse
I hope you and others can easily see the hypocrisy of the three previous comments. It goes to show that those who hold such contrary opinions to your very good points are not at all interested in genuine equality, but only that they receive what they consider a "fair" shake. How else to explain the lengths to which they go to completely ignore your points.
But keep making them!
I disagree with your knee-jerk reaction that this cartoon is anti-male, anti-father. It's a character in a cartoon strip. If you feel that strongly about cartoon strips that portray fathers, mothers, children in a negative light then please read and comment on Drabble, Wizard of Id, Pickles, Cathy, Get Fuzzy, Dilbert as well as political cartoons. Singling out one strip that was published a week before Fathers Day does not make you sound very informed. I notice, reading the comments that have previously been posted, that I am not in the minority.
Dr J
I'm with Dennis on this one.
Cox and Forkum would be closed down by the Homosexuals, Islamists and Liberals if they were able to apply your reasoning into action.
Petition for family friendly cartoons with humour against what isn't.
MikeNZ
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