The One Rule that Conservatives Never Learn

Like any other interest group, social conservatives like publicity. More often than not, they'll try to generate that publicity by making some unusual statement on the social issues of the day.

However, there is one rule that, if not heeded, guarantees that your public issue campaign will backfire on you, resulting in people dismissing you as a quack:

NEVER PICK A FIGHT WITH A FICTIONAL CHARACTER.

Look at what happened with Vice-President Dan Quayle. In 1992 he picked a fight with "Murphy Brown" by holding her up as a negative image of the single mother. Didn't exactly help his image now, did it?

Or Jerry Falwell suggesting that a purple Teletubby was gay. A baby-talking fake costume has a sexual orientation? I don't think Falwell's been taken seriously ever since.

So, you'd think that by now Christian conservatives like Dr. James Dobson would know better, but noooooo ...

Now, a few days later, it seems that Dr. Dobson is doing a little backtracking here, trying to point to the organization rather than the character, but still, the damage has been done.

2004 put the cultural liberals of Hollywood on the run, shocking them into realizing how out-of-touch their values were with the rest of North America. Does the Christian Right really want to demonstrate that they can be as silly as the Secular Left?