This weekend while watching LOGO’s short film festival, I nearly jumped out of my chair when Pat Robertson came on the screen. No, I had not sat on the remote and my TV did not blow up. Mr. Robertson is appearing in a public service announcement (PSA) for the “We Can Solve It” Campaign where he sits alongside Reverend Al Sharpton on a beach.
The theme of the piece, not surprisingly, is “unlikely alliances.” The commercial is part of the We Campaign, which is a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by former Vice President Al Gore.
Having worked at a TV station and scheduled promotional commercials and PSA, I can attest to seeing some bizarre PSAs (most of which I left on the shelf) and I think this one might not have been a perfect fit for LOGO’s airwaves.
Sure, I agree that global warming is a universal issue that we must all band together to combat – I even attended an inspiring speech by Al Gore on the topic a mere two weeks ago at Radio City. And we’ve written about the “greening of the gay community” here several times, but I wonder if Robertson knows about his inclusion on LOGO (especially sandwiched between a short film on an Indian mother beating up her gay son’s bully and an Asian gay male love story)? And if he does, what he would say about it?
What do you think? Is LOGO’s programming department off base in including Robertson or does the global warming cause trump their “safe haven” approach?
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I saw the PSA on LOGO. I’m not a big fan of LOGO, anyway, but when I was watching the short films and saw this, I liked it even less.
At first I was going to write that while not a good choice, it wasn’t a slap in the face either. Then I decided to Google “Pat Robertson and gays” and came up with some horrible things he’s said against gays and lesbians. My new conclusion is that this PSA is completely inappropriate for Logo.
Read for yourself…
http://www.hatecrime.org/subpages/hatespeech/robertson.html