It was on a sunny day last February when an elderly couple walked up the steps of San Francisco City Hall to have their relationship officially recognized by the State of California. They would’ve been like any other couple, except for the fact that they both had long hair and could easily pass for our grandmothers.

Their bond had lasted over half a century, yet it was only through the rebellious actions of an upstart mayor from San Francisco that their relationship was briefly granted the guise of legitimacy. A short while later, the protestors would show up holding signs spouting asinine slogans like “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” and wearing the word “Jesus” on their shirts as if he were a high school mascot.

Earlier this month, the FOX Broadcasting Company premiered a 90-minute special called “Who’s Your Daddy?”, a show in which an attractive young woman who had been adopted early in life had to guess who her biological father was from a group of nine men. It was the pinnacle of creative programming from the network that brought you the “American Idol” series, which, by my estimate, is likely to be the number one cause of aneurisms in America.

Contrast the two and ask yourselves – which is worse for the supposedly sacred institutions of marriage and family: two elderly lesbians getting married in San Francisco or crappy reality television?

To America, the answer is apparently the former, as 11 states passed gay marriage bans last November, some even going as far as to ban civil unions while they were at it. We live in a country where the mere allusion of something that is not politically correct in the realm of gender or race brings the proverbial hammer down on your head. Yet it is OK for Christian bigots like Senator Rick Santorum to claim on the Senate floor that banning gay marriage is a part of homeland security.

It would seem to me that America has its priorities mixed up. A show like “Who’s Your Daddy?” is not an isolated phenomena. I’ll remind readers that the folks at FOX also brought you high-grade entertainment in the form of “Temptation Island” and “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?”. My favorite was “Married By America,” a show that operated on the astounding assumption that people who couldn’t even elect a president in the last two election cycles had the capacity to choose spouses for complete strangers.

This is why I propose a pact – an unholy alliance, if you will – between those on the Christian right and us in the anti-crappy TV middle. It’s not that I really care about the morality of reality TV, which strikes me as an oxymoron – emphasis on the moron part. It’s just that whenever I see advertising for these shows during my daily 30-minute “The Simpsons” venture into TV land, it makes me want to flagellate myself with a blunt object, something that I generally consider to be a bad thing.

Finding out who’s responsible for all this is a simple matter of connecting the dots. Who owns FOX?
Right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Who produces and distributes this amoral/terrible programming?

Big media.

To whom do both Murdoch and big media contribute in order to ensure an oligopoly of media ownership?

Conservatives in Congress.

So who’s to blame? Try a combination of the three.

For all their sanctimonious tirades on values or lack thereof, congressional conservatives have proven time and time again that they are more loyal to the almighty dollar than they are to the almighty. If religious conservatives could only see past the supposed evils of two grandmothers getting married and the real culprit, big media, it would be the first step away from bigotry and toward actually doing something positive for America – namely ridding us of cringe-inducing television. You know what they say: The enemy of my enemy is my friend, even if he or she is my enemy. I’ll be right there on the picket lines. I’ll be the one who’s not wearing Jesus on his shirt.

Daily Nexus columnist Neil Visalvanich nominates Homer Simpson to take over the FOX Broadcasting Company. What, he’s not real?