THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW

It all started when a member informed me via email that the CoE was featured prominently on a Christian web site. I took a look, and sure enough, there we were: number two in a list of three examples of why the internet should be abolished, complete with a cannibalism-encouraging letter I wrote to some Christian moron who thought the CoE was pro-life sarcasm. The first example was our sister organization the First Church of Christ, Abortionist, and the third example was a series of nifty photographs depicting various sex acts, including coprophagia (shit-eating) and dog-blowing. The site belonged to the Creator's Rights Party, and their taste in porn was making them very unpopular with their fellow Christians. That was about all I knew until a producer from the Springer show approached me and asked if I would be willing to debate Neal Horsley. Sure, I said, but who the hell is Neal Horsley? So I did a web search and who should pop up but the Creator's Rights Party. Well how about that.

So it turns out that the CRP is Neal's thing, and that shutting down the internet is only a minor part of his agenda. Neal's main focus is on encouraging his home state of Georgia to secede from the union, after seizing its nuclear weapons, and then demand that the Federal government halt abortion and begin arresting faggots. Neal appears to be running for governor on this delightful platform, though it's unclear how much progress he's made. Meanwhile our Springer producer asks if we can supply a prospective member: someone who wants to join, and would be willing to do it on the show, in a ceremony of some kind. Remember, this is showbiz: talk shows love surprises, panelists proposing marriage to each other, fistfights, and so on. Sure, I said, and no need to mention that the person I had in mind was already a member. A few days later the producer called back and asked if we could also find someone who didn't want her to join, a fiancée or family member perhaps. Sure, I said, would an ex-boyfriend be close enough? Grace (our prospective member) had a friend who was willing to do it, and he got past the producer's screening call easily enough.

By this point Vermin, Pastor Kim, and I were having all-day planning meetings to hammer out strategy and tactics. A more systematic inspection of the CRP web site revealed that Neal was an ex-con: he'd been a hippy pot-dealer in the sixties, someone narced on him, and he'd done a three-year stint in the slammer, during which time he underwent a major religious conversion. Could there possibly be a connection, I asked? Pot-dealing hippy goes in, nuke-loving Christian homophobe comes out, what happened inside? Was Neal too popular? We decided to send Neal an email from a false address, asking friendly questions about some of the obvious contradictions in his web site (e.g. he denies encouraging domestic terrorism, but his home page features a photo of the Oklahoma bombing and a comprehensive list of people currently imprisoned for anti-abortion violence). The response was mostly flowery rhetoric, but with one electrifying exception:

"The easiest way to understand what I'm saying is to visualize what it's like in prison to be approached by a gang intent on rape. They might come with smiling faces, but their history has already proven their willingness to rape. What does a person do?"

The real question, of course, is what did Neal do, and we asked him on the show, after confronting him with this quote, though unfortunately the scene was cut, along with just about everything else we did that involved Neal. But I'm getting ahead of our story.

At this point the producer called to inform me that Neal would be joined by his friend Mike Bray, who had done almost four years in prison for conspiracy to bomb ten abortion clinics. Apparently the clinics were blown up at night, so that no one was injured. Mike was unrepentant, and had gone so far as to publish a book called "A Time to Kill," consisting mostly of scriptural justification for anti-abortion violence. The producer also announced that the show would be titled "Suicide Cannibal Cult and God's Army." Throughout this period he urged me not to let Neal and Mike back down or dodge the issues, to call them on nuclear secession and homophobia, and so forth. He had no reason to worry: we were preparing hell on earth for these clowns. The smoking gun was an AP story in the Boston Globe that linked "Army of God" bombings in Atlanta, Georgia-including the bombing of an abortion clinic and a gay disco-to the Olympic Park bombing. The story mentioned a letter that had surfaced in which the bombers railed against homosexuality and other "ungodly perversions." It sure sounded like our boys. We decided to confront them with this story on the show, and allege that if they didn't do it themselves, they probably know exactly who did. It was obvious that the CRP was to anti-abortion violence what Sinn Fein is the IRA, so we had a pretty good case, good enough for Springer anyway.

Fast forward to the day of the show: it's about an hour before we go on, I'm having my makeup done, and our producer comes into the dressing room, looking unhappy. "Bad news," he says, "we had a big meeting last night, and I was overruled, so we're changing the title of the show to "I Want to Join a Suicide Cult," we're moving the focus away from the Christians and more onto Grace, Neal won't come on until the third segment, oh and Mike Bray will be in the audience instead of on the panel." Just what everyone wants to hear an hour before they go on national TV. Why did they do it? Were they afraid of Christian backlash? Our producer maintains it was done purely for practical reasons. It was felt that the show's concept was too political and abstract, and that audience simply wouldn't get it. It's arguably true that most people who watch Jerry Springer can't spell secession, don't know what it means, and don't care. Once the Christians were written out of the script, the plot could be reduced to "nice girl falls into the hands of evil suicide cannibal cult," which, as everyone knows, is a Bad Thing.

So the real answer to your question is that as far as I can tell, Jerry doesn't have much to do with the show's content. The producers set up the plot, and he tries to follow it, which is usually easy enough, because unlike the CoE, most guests are more than happy to follow the plot too. Jerry is just a glorified talking head, and a poorly informed one at that. He probably shows up an hour before he goes on, they give him coffee and a donut and card with a few facts on it, and say "go get 'em, Jerry." He reads his sanctimonious closing remarks off a teleprompter. According to Boston Globe, when he appeared at a local college the other day he said that while he his enjoys his job, he doesn't watch the show, and "it has nothing to do with who I am." He also attacked mainstream news shows as being much more invasive than talk shows, where the guests are voluntary. "The news is tabloid," he said, "not our silly little show."

Cannibalism is a radical but realistic solution to the problem of overpopulation. —Prince Philip

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