I was watching an NBA pre-game show on ESPN the other day when something surprising happened. During an interview, a coach expressed his opinion that sports journalists should not quote a source if the source “doesn’t have the balls” to identify himself or herself in print.

The coach’s comment wasn’t all that surprising. What struck me was that ESPN bleeped out the word “balls” during a basketball pre-game show. They censored the word “balls” during a ball game.
It is now official: The obscenity police have gone too far.
Oh, sure. Censorship absurdity was rampant in the past. I can remember years ago when MTV would bleep out the word “pot.” But MTV, despite its branding, has never had a backbone — or balls, if you prefer — when it comes to controversy. What we are witnessing today is a fundamental shift. Anti-cursing hysteria has gripped this nation’s broadcasters, and it is going to get worse before it gets better.
Not even Christ is safe. ABC bleeped out the word “Jesus” when it was recently taken in vain on “The View.” And it wasn’t even used as an expletive.
What started all of this? Well, it’s hard to pin down, but it probably began with Bono. During a live telecast of the 2003 Golden Globe Awards he said, “This is really, really f—— brilliant.” (That was exactly how the quote appeared on CNN.com. I don’t see why so many letters need to be blanked out. I would prefer the more popular “f—ing” or the artistry of the all-
symbols approach: @$!&%^ or even
better, %@$^&!#).
In October the Federal Communications Commission ruled that Bono’s use of the f-word was technically decent since he was using it as an “adjective” to “emphasize an exclamation.” As Gene Weingarten would point out in The Washington Post Magazine, the FCC was wrong: Bono was actually using the word as an adverb, not an adjective. Whatever the case, the FCC quickly reversed its decision after it received nearly 200,000 complaints.
That wasn’t enough for Congress, so it developed legislation called the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2004 that would, among other things, dramatically increase fines for on-air indecency. The House version of the bill passed with a 391-22 bipartisan vote. Soon the Senate will vote on its version of the bill.
In order to close any linguistic loopholes, the bill lists eight words and phrases that are always punishable if broadcasted regardless of context or grammatical form, including “hyphenated compounds” as well as “verb, adjective, gerund, participle and infinitive forms.”
Gerund? Where is my Diana Hacker “Pocket Style Manual?” Let’s see here… “A gerund is a verb form ending in ­ing that functions as a…” Ah, screw it.
There are eight banned words and phrases — words I would list here were it not for Emerald standards. However, some of the words are f—, s—, mother-f—er, piss, asshole.. Since combinations of the words are also banned, you couldn’t say “piss-hole” or the phrase popular with the kids these days: “mother-assing.”
We should learn two lessons from this madness. First, human beings love to scapegoat rather than deal with real problems. Instead of talking about the issues facing America’s youth, we argue about the word “piss.” Why isn’t Congress dealing with rampant child poverty and homelessness, lack of decent K-12 education and physical and sexual abuse? These are the real issues, not the phrase “asshole” on television.
The second lesson we should learn is that we need more people under 60 in Washington, because only somebody completely out of touch with the 21st century could think young people care about the amount of bad language on TV.
How about focusing on the amount of bad television on TV first?