News: The Mormon angle to the Buster brouhaha

American public discourse has been atwitter the past week over PBS's decision to not distribute an episode of the children's TV series "Postcards from Buster," that features the animated rabbit Buster visiting a sugar farm in Vermont run by a same-sex couple. Some local stations are choosing to air the episode anyway. According to a San Francisco Chronicle article, the series also includes a visit to a "Mormon family in Utah" and has featured "an Orthodox Jewish family in New York, a Muslim family in Chicago and Pentecostal Christians in North Carolina."

I have no interest in engaging in a debate about whether or not PBS made a good decision or not. I haven't seen the segment.

However, the fact that this series includes a Mormon family raises some interesting issues for how Mormons approach American public disourse -- news, entertainment, education and politics.

In recent years, Mormons have generally allied themselves with the family values movement and the conservative side of the cultural wars. We have even made common cause with Evangelical Christians because of perceived common interests (abortion, same-sex marriage, entertainment standards) and antagonists. It seems like a natural thing for Mormons to do.

The problem with this approach, however, is that we're only useful to so long as we stick to common issues and play by the rules. It seems to me that Evangelicals and even some mainline Protestants are fine with us as long as we don't assert too much of our unique doctrine, history and perspectives. Perhaps the issues are important enough that for us to accept the cultural conventional wisdom that is created by such associations --- Mormons are just like fundamentalist Christians (who aren't really Christian) except they don't drink or smoke and plus there's that whole polygamy thing.

The inclusion of a Mormon family in "Postcards from Buster" suggests an alternative approach. We position ourselves as a unique ethnicity, people, group (whatever term you want to use) that deserves the same type of treatment that other ethnic groups receive -- arts and culture funding, respect and coverage from the media, characters in TV and movies, courses at public universities, festivals, etc.

Granted, this is the approach of liberal activists -- and such activism tends to focus more on race and gender. But at the same time, liberals seem more likely to deal with a population on its own terms and with an emphasis on its uniqueness -- thus why Buster visits Muslim, Orthodox Jewish and Pentecostal families -- albeit always within the overall frame of tolerance and multiculturalism. The downside of this approach, of course, is that it usually means that certain elements of a culture are watered down (see the holiday episode of Sesame Street, for example). Mormons become all about pioneers and Jello -- and more about culture and less about belief, perhaps. The Buster episode should be an interesting test of what the 'libral' story of Mormonism now is (or at least the one that it is acceptable to tell to children).

Of course, the reality is that because Mormons are not a homogeneous group and because we are becoming big enough (and around enough) that those who traffic in (or act as gatekeepers for) public discourse have to deal with us we'll see both approaches taking place.

And I honestly am not sure what I prefer. Or rather I should say that my preference is that we be discussed as uniquely as possible, but that that be driven by those outside of Mormondom just as much as by the efforts of Mormons. I'm also aware that I'm conflating the cultural and the political here, and that may be problematic. But I think I'm pointing at the most widespread and overt ways in which Mormonism bubbles up into public discourse.