'Married' male couple on CBS
Posted on 05/29/2003 12:21:03 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
CBS Television is promoting tonight's debut of "The Amazing Race 4" by proudly proclaiming a male homosexual couple on the show to be married to each other.
The primetime reality show features 12 teams of two people with a pre-existing relationship racing around the world in a quest for a million-dollar prize.
'Married' male couple on CBS |
In current promotional ads on the air, the network touts one of the teams – consisting of two men – as ''The Married Couple.''
"Yes, they are a married, gay couple," a CBS spokeswoman tells WorldNetDaily. "They're married and they're gay. Is there an issue?"
On the show's website, viewers are encouraged to click on biographical links for the teams, to learn more about their personal lives. The write-up on the "married" male couple includes the following:
Twenty-eight-year-old Reichen is a pilot and teaches at a flight school in Los Angeles. A former U.S. Air Force officer and a graduate of the U.S. Air Force academy, he is married to his teammate Chip. He loves skiing and flying and is very into being physically fit. He describes himself as "detail-oriented, caring and thrill-seeking." He speaks French and has traveled internationally quite a bit. Reichen's views on relationships are much more liberal than Chip's – He enjoys flirting with other guys, but that makes Chip upset.
Owned by Viacom, CBS says "Amazing Race" has previously featured "gay" contestants, but this is the first time it's trumpeting homosexuals as actually being married to each other.
"They bring a tremendous amount of enthusiasm into the show. They're great!" says the network.
When WorldNetDaily pressed CBS to find out more about the alleged matrimony of its contestants, the network explained that's what Reichen and Chip had written in their application to be on the program.
"Why can't they say they're married? What's the difference?" said the CBS spokeswoman. She went on to state she "believe[d] it's legal in certain states," though she did not specify where the Californians had any binding ceremony, if in fact they had one at all.
Family advocates are blasting CBS's marketing move, saying there's no such thing as legal homosexual marriage in the U.S.
 Robert Knight |
"Two men is not a marriage. It's pretend marriage," says Robert Knight, a former news editor at the Los Angeles Times who is now director of the Culture and Family Institute.
"This is profoundly dishonest and is intended to persuade Americans that so-called 'gay marriage' is already a reality, when no jurisdiction in America has legalized it."
While there's no government sanction for homosexual marriages, the state of Vermont has approved what it calls civil unions, the legal equivalent to marriage in everything but name. Two other states – California and Hawaii – have approved laws regarding benefits of domestic partners.
But many other states are passing legislation to resist the status of homosexual marriages.
On Tuesday, Texas became the 37th state to approve a law preventing the legal recognition of same-sex unions that have been sanctified by a government elsewhere.
"Like the vast majority of Texans, I believe that marriage represents a sacred union between a man and a woman," Gov. Rick Perry said in a statement.
For broadcast television, homosexuality is not a new concept.
 Sean Hayes portrays homosexual on 'Will & Grace' (NBC) |
Sitcoms like ABC's "Ellen" and NBC's "Will and Grace" have been among the first programs to put "gays" and lesbians in the limelight, and just this week, the cable channel Bravo – owned by the NBC division of General Electric – announced its summer launch of TV's first homosexual dating series, "Boy Meets Boy."
"As bad as 'Ellen' and 'Will and Grace' have been, ['The Amazing Race' married-homosexual promotion] is an outright lie," said Knight. "This is the worst we have seen from the broadcast networks. ... It's another reason why the big networks are losing viewers, and people are gravitating toward alternative news sources such as WorldNetDaily and the Fox News Channel."
Knight suggests people objecting to this and other programs log onto websites like OneMillionMoms.com and OneMillionDads.com which provide links for viewers to opine to broadcasters and advertisers.
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American Express is one of the advertisers to have had high-profile tie-ins with "The Amazing Race," and while the company no longer has its "Moment of the Week" promotion, it says its current slate of commercials will continue to appear on CBS.
"We are a global company and advertise on a wide variety of programs through a number of different media to reach a diverse audience – current as well as potential customers," American Express spokeswoman Monica Beaupre told WorldNetDaily.
Other large companies which have had special advertising segments on previous "Amazing Race" series include Royal Caribbean Cruises, T-Mobile and Kodak.
As WorldNetDaily reported in October, Kodak is proud of its commitment to diversity, which includes homosexuality, even firing a 23-year Kodak veteran after he objected to a pro-homosexual memo circulated in the company's e-mail.
Leslie Moonves, president and CEO of CBS-TV says the network is committed to displaying diversity in the shows it airs:
As broadcasters, we aim to ensure that our national viewing audience is reflected in our programming and our people.
We recognize that a workforce comprised of a wide variety of perspectives, viewpoints and backgrounds is integral to our continued success.
This is not a campaign, but rather a fundamental way of doing business at CBS, and we continue to be steadfast in our goal to become more diverse and more representative of the public we serve.
Tonight's season premiere of "The Amazing Race" airs at 8 p.m. Eastern Time, in what's considered to be the family portion of primetime. Officials say previous episodes have drawn an estimated audience of nine million viewers.
"There's a buzz about the show, but we have not received any calls one way or another about the participants," said Joe Barnes, director of marketing at KOIN-TV, the CBS affiliate in Portland, Ore.
In San Francisco, a market with a large homosexual population, the CBS owned-and-operated station KPIX-TV speculates more people will be talking about the "gay marriage" angle once the program is broadcast.
"We've heard nothing from gays saying 'Thanks,'" said KPIX spokeswoman Akilah Monifah. "We've also heard nothing from homophobic types saying, 'How could you?' either."
I think it was Andrew Sullivan who said that he didn't know any homosexual men who wanted to be married, but he knew a lot who wanted to have a wedding.
The quote above is typical of most male homosexual relationships. They are not about monogamy, pretend marriage or not.
CBS might have this stunt backfire on them if their aim is to try to make the idea of homosexual marriage more palatable to the American public. If viewers see this Reichen guy flirting all the time and his 'partner' getting jealous, it certainly won't give them a positive view of the idea.
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