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alternative title(s): Moral Guardian; Moral Watchdogs
Moral Guardians
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Down with this sort of thing!
" There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."
— Erich Fromm
People, stereotypically either conservative Bible thumpers or politically correct liberals, who believe that children — or people in general, but especially children — shouldn't be exposed to what they consider to be excessive violence, "perverted" minorities, sex, foul language, sexism, racial or ethnic stereotypes, laziness, etc. The exact mix of what they object to of course varies from group to group, though sex, violence, and "Satanic" or sacrilegious content, as well as the occasional accusation of Subliminal Seduction, are popular complaints.
In itself, this isn't unreasonable. However, the term " Moral Guardians" — in theory — specifically describes people, individually or in groups, who take this attitude beyond the pale as zealous, absolute purveyors of the moral code, and the arbiters of what is best for everyone. Usually, they are self-appointed, and in the case of groups, some have been known to claim vastly larger memberships than they actually have.
At this extreme, their criticisms completely miss the point; in particularly bad cases, they seize on some sensational-sounding passage out of context, even when the implied immoral message is definitively negated elsewhere in the work. And sometimes, their objections seem downright bizarre. How common certain objections are depends where the group falls on the "political spectrum" ( assuming they're on it at all). Of course, this means if they all had their way, the big ratings hit every season would be a blank grey screen ( and even then, they would argue about the shade of grey).
They frequently complain to the nearest Media Watchdog, often using astroturfing to lend illusory weight to their complaints.
Their actions frequently have the opposite effect of what they intended as they draw much more attention and curiosity to what they're attacking, resulting in increased sales or ratings. If they succeed in getting Content Warnings attached to a work it often results in a Forbidden Fruit appeal. If they produce works intended to show the evils of objectionable content or rail against it while simultaneously portraying it in the media, it often results in a case of Do Not Do This Cool Thing.
Enough nattering by them, especially when it's about a relatively young medium (no, not that kind of medium, although that might get their ire anyway), can lead to the creation of a Censorship Bureau. If that isn't good enough for them, they make the Moral Substitutes.
The Culture Police are sometimes Moral Guardians taken to a satiric and/or frightening extreme. The Bluenose Bowdlerizers are a form of Moral Guardians in our midst. Moral Guardians are often responsible for a work being Banned In China, or calling something a " Murder Simulator".
See also Black and White Insanity, Pitying Perversion and Activist Fundamentalist Antics.
Examples:
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Automobiles
- Way back in 1971, Dodge introduced a car called the Dart Demon, complete with a cartoony pitchfork-wielding devil as its mascot. Some Christian groups complained and two years later the name was changed to Dart Sport.
Anime and Manga
- This happened in the late 1990s with "Hentai FREE", which basically served as a way for ten-year-old fangirls to assure their parents and brag to themselves that their Sailor Moon fan site had nothing to do with those horrid articles about some boy in elementary school getting caught with hentai from the library.
- In 1997, Sailor Moon Stars was dubbed in Italy. Also in 1997, Italian "psychologist" Vera Slepoy said "Sailor Moon makes little boys gay". Cue the Sailor Starlights (an alien boy band who revert to their true female forms to fight) becoming six people instead of three — with the alien boy band now calling on their twin sisters to fight.
- Even more interesting is the fact that due to this butchering Mediaset actually lost the right to broadcast the anime, revoked by the author itself! It took ten years before Italian fans could watch their beloved series again.
- The TV broadcast of Axis Powers Hetalia was canceled due to a few very vocal South Korean busybodies taking umbrage at the portrayal of their country and characterizing it as a right-wing political tract; thanks to Misplaced Nationalism, this has led to some truly nasty anti-Korean backlash from some fans. Also, Korea wasn't scheduled to show up in the anime anyway.
- In 1995, a doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo, released sarin gas in the Tokyo metro, killing around a dozen people. It soon came out that the cult disseminated some of its propaganda in the form of manga, and that its founder took some of his crazy ideology from sci-fi anime. This prompted a public backlash against anime and manga for a couple years.
- When it was just getting over a 1989 serial killer who claimed his cartoon rat alter ego told him to kill girls.
- the writers of Blogs 4 Brownbacks portray themselves a moral guardians against anime, which they claim is perverted and bad for children, while only presenting anime which is not intended for children in the first place. The commenters of the blog are quick to point this out....and are ignored
Comic Books
- The Comics Code Authority. In the early 1950s, Dr. Frederic Wertham published a book called The Seduction of the Innocent, which was about how comic books were corrupting the youth at the time, which he backed up with many anecdotes. The agency sanitized American comics to an absurd point, so much that questioning authority and scary creatures were banned, and drugs and disabled people could not even be mentioned.
- It got to the point where a Spider-Man strip based around Harry Osborn overdosing had to be published without CCA approval, even though it dealt entirely with the negative effects of drugs, and had been requested by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. This event is often pointed to as the beginning of the CCA's downfall. A series of drastic standards-changes followed, but it was already apparent that the CCA was unnecessary and soon their approval was not necessary for a comic to hit shelves.
- In January 2011, DC Comics and Archie Comics, the last two publishers participating in the Code, withdrew. It is now pretty much dead.
- In the Franco-Swiss comic Titeuf there was a school nurse with E-cup Gag Boobs. Thanks to moral guardians they've been reduced to C.
- Lampooned in these two
 ◊ strips◊ by cartoonist Quino.
Film
- The National Legion of Decency was a censor group dating back to the Golden Age of Hollywood. In their heyday, they could effectively kill a film's prospects at the box office by condemning it or declaring it "morally objectionable." Their power began to wane in The Fifties as a consequence of two things: first, non-Catholics were no longer paying any heed to their declarations, and second, the Supreme Court's 1952 decision in Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson (the "Miracle Decision") to declare film a protected art form struck a huge blow against religious-based censorship. By The Seventies, they had largely faded into irrelevance, although it wouldn't be until 2001 before they were finally dissolved.
- Many film critics decried The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film sympathetic to the Irish Revolution, as anti-British propaganda, often without having even seen it. One such Moral Guardian even went so far as to compare the film to Triumph of the Will. As a result, quite a few English theatres refused to screen it. Although the film portrays the Black-And-Tan soldiers in a very poor light, any historian will tell you that yes, that's pretty accurate, and no, Barley is not propaganda.
- The Chinese government is this on a regular basis. Some of their issues are a bit understandable, if frustrating (a movie shown in a Chinese theater must have the villain - if s/he broke some law - be caught and/or face the consequences in the end, and movies that don't have this portrayal must either provide an alternate ending for the Chinese or not be shown in theaters at all), but others can be pretty much summarized to suit heavily-biased Communist Party ideology.
- The latest thing they've banned is time travel.
- What the PTC is to television, the Childcare Action Project (usually called by its acronym CAP) is to movies (with the exception of "effective".). Its founder, Tom Carder, appears to have chosen a pretentious acronym first and then built a rating system around that: "WISDOM," which divides the sins of movies into the categories "Wanton violence/crime", "Impudence/hate", "Sexual immorality", "Drugs/alcohol", "Offense to God", and "Murder/suicide". He then goes on to be incredibly verbose in justifying his system, with charts, no less. Note that whenever a score by his system goes completely against common sense, he, without exception, calls it "proof of the objectivity" of his system. He has a long, detailed explanation for watching movies that are rated as being only appropriate for adults. It basically amounts to "a few parents might take their kids to R-rated movies and I know better than them (and everyone else)".
- The Dove Foundation has a similar approach to rating movies.
- Arguably less heavy-handed in his movie reviews is Dr. Ted Baehr. He rates films on a scale of + 4 for "exemplary" to -4 for "abhorrent", and classifies Shirtless Scenes as "upper male nudity".
- In South Australia Family First MP Dennis Hood recently had a law passed, where all R rated films in South Australia (eg: Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now, etc) have to either a) be placed in the 'adult section' of all video stores (in a similar fashion to porn titles) or b) have an entirely blank cover displaying only the films name in small font and a note saying that the film may cause offense, furthermore all studios are banned from advertising any R rated films (such as the ones mentioned) on any medium.
- The Australian Family Association is also responsible for many movie bans. Other than its requisite gay-bashing, it tried to get the OFLC to ban 9 Songs, Anatomy of Hell, Irreversible, Mysterious Skin and Shortbus. It was actually successful with Baise-moi and Ken Park.
- In a Take That to the MPAA, Melvin Van Peebles marketed Sweet Sweetback's Badassss Song as "Rated X by an all-white jury." The implication that a nonwhite jury would have been totally okay with an unsimulated sex scene involving a minor couldn't possibly have been intended.
Food
- MeMe Roth of the National Action Against Obesity. She claimed that Jordin Sparks was a bad idea for American Idol because she was overweight. She claims that eating cupcakes is the same as putting a gun into your mouth. She demands that the school her kids go to give permission slips in order for the kids to eat anything in the lunch menu.
Internet
- Stephen Conroy, the current Australian Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (ie. head government internet guy) has made plans, approved by the Federal Government which he is a part of, to force mandatory censorship on the Internet at the ISP level for all Internet users in Australia, in which the government gets to decide what is appropriate and what isn't. Even worse, what is and isn't blocked will be kept secret (as a guide, it's very similar what China and Iran have in place). This despite the fact that every test conducted thus far has shown blanket filters to be complete pants when it comes to actually achieving anything, and almost unanimous, vitriolic opposition to the idea on all fronts. Following the 2010 Election, the filter is as Dead as Disco. The Labor Party could only remain in power by creating a coalition government with three Independent and one Greens MP. As all four of these men oppose the filter, and the Liberal/National Coalition has remained steadfast in their opposition to the filter, it's not even going to make it to the Senate. Hasn't stop Conroy talking about it every chance he can get.
- France wasn't as lucky, the filtering was adopted as part of the LOPPSI2 law (albeit regarding the amount of material blocked it's not that bad: unless you REALLY search for nasty stuff (pro-terrorism, snuff, Holocaust denial...), you're fine).
- Plugged In Online, a site run by Focus On The Family, contains reviews for films, as well as TV shows, music and video games. Generally speaking, the reviews tend to be decently written and actually relatively reasonable compared to those by the likes of Carder and Baehr, but can still get a tad vitriolic at times; controversial stuff like House and Desperate Housewives is frequently dismissed as a "bad influence" with little word as to the actual quality of their content.
- But you see, that's kind of the point. Plugged In is mostly about showcasing the family friendly/unfriendly-ness of various media, and only secondarily about the actual quality of the work. But on the other hand, one clever reviewer picked up on a huge plot hole for The Dark Knight.
- A unique subversion of this trope involves the Child Online Protection Act, a law passed in 1998 meant to stop kids from seeing porn. Almost the moment it was passed, the Supreme Court issued an order preventing the government from enforcing it due to arguments that it violated free speech due to its vague and broadly-determined definition of what "harmful sexual content by contemporary community standards" meant. Various attempts to remove the ban on its enforcement have been similarly struck down. This is why age verification on pornsites—when it exists at all—is so damned laughable: they'll never be prosecuted.
- There's also the Children's Internet Protection Act of 2000, which requires all schools and public libraries to install filters on their computers in order to receive certain federal funds. It's been challenged by the American Library Association, which has a general policy of frowning on anything that restricts free access to information, but it was upheld by the Supreme Court.
- In an example of a fandom developing these from within, the Furry Fandom contains groups such as the now-disbanded Burned Furs and Improved Anthropomorphics, anthropomorphic enthusiasts who believe the community has been corrupted with many of its members' obsession with risqué media, and promote a "cleansing" of the fandom to a more pure, unadulterated state. Unlike many of the above, they aren't usually taken seriously, and their attempts at changing the fandom generally don't have much impact.
- "Warriors for Innocence", a volunteer-based anti-pedophilia group who made news by encouraging Livejournal to temporarily ban over 500 accounts and communities, ranging from age-playing and incest fetish groups to child molestation victim communities to groups discussing fanfiction or Lolita to otherwise completely innocuous accounts who just happened to have the kind of buzzwords they were looking for in the profile. A complete summary of the event, termed "Strikethrough '07" (for the way that banned journals have a strike through their names) can be found here.
- Moral Guardians are one of FSTDT's favourite targets.
- [Semi-]parodied by Intuitor: The minds of our children and their ability to master vectors are (shudder) at stake.
- CommonSenseMedia.org are usually pretty good about not going overboard and giving people information to decide for themselves, but it was incredibly funny when they listed all the throat-slashing, rape, burning death, and a steamy kiss in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Also, they spent more time talking about the religious themes hinted at on the Evanescence album Fallen (apparently it might offend militant atheists or something) then the fact that most Evanescence songs are rather creepy - and that "Tourniquet" is about suicide and "Haunted" is about being stalked and raped! That's right, kids, it's perfectly okay for you to listen to songs about death, suicide, and rape, but we'll make sure you don't hear any awful religious talk!
- Warhammer 40,000 Radio was shut down because someone said "nigger" near the end of an eight hour program and then the host started getting death threats sent to his family, also having disturbing and sad similarity to Ned Flanders quote in the beginning of the article.
- Parodied in The Abridging of Haruhi Suzumiya (episode 2).
Mikuru: If you plan on doing what you thought in episode 1, it's not gonna work.
Kyon: umm... How did you...
Mikuru: It's because there's already enough sexual content in this show as it is. Adding any more and we'd have children-sheltering mothers lined outside the writer's door armed with pitchforks and torches. But... we can still be friends if you want.
Kyon: Curse you, sheltering mothers of the internet. Curse you all!!
- The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a group of parents who are more than happy to police other people's kids, but not their own.
- The innocuously-named MovieGuide.org is a "[Christian] family guide to movies and entertainment," and can make for some fairly entertaining reading—unsurprisingly, they strictly condemn anything that seems to support "immoral behavior," "political correctness" (they objected to the identity of the bomber in Source Code, for example—and they haaaated Inside Job) or a "humanist" worldview, and particularly anything containing "Pagan" (i.e., anything other than Christian) themes. They're also given to occasional racism, like in their review of Eclipse in which they repeatedly refer to "Jakob" as "Indian" (although they praise the story's "strong moral values," such as the 'no sex before marriage' theme), not to mention more-than-incidental homophobia. It's worth a read.
- This is a fear with the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP bills going through Congress in 2011. While the creators of the bills are insistent that they are only for shutting down websites selling bootleg merchandise, many are afraid that it'll devolve into shutting down websites for completely idiotic reasons, like a video of kids dancing while a copyrighted song was playing in the background.
Literature
- Thomas Bowdler published versions of Shakespeare and Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire edited to be more appropriate for Victorian-era women and children, inspiring the word bowdlerise/bowdlerize. Bowdler did that for the sake of appeasing other Moral Guardians, and actually urged people to seek out the original copies. It's rather like in-house censoring for the sake of allowing something to be published/broadcast.
- Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 blamed these people for the slow chipping away at free speech that led to all books being banned. Naturally, the book has found itself challenged as often as Harry Potter, never mind the irony in banning a book about book banning.
- Not as ironic as the author himself coming out in favor of censorship.
- The short story "The Toys of Peace" by Saki deals with this trope, and is based on an actual 1914 London newspaper story. In short, the Moral Guardians of the story are worried that giving young boys army figures and other war-themed toys would encourage them to be violent so instead they propose "peace toys" which are basically miniature civilians in front of the civil buildings (i.e. the YMCA) holding the tools of industry, instead of miniature soldiers with guns. Needless to say, when the narrator presents these toys to his nephews, the boys simply adapt the buildings for their existing military figures and play war games anyway.
- Beautifully summarized in the first episode of Barney Miller. Barney's son comes in with a toy gun yelling "Bang", just as Barney is locking up his own gun in a cupboard. Barney gives him a short lecture about firearms being dangerous, gives him a toy truck to play with instead, and the kid holds it up and goes "Bang". Later he does the same thing with a slice of pizza.
- The Catcher in the Rye: The Jerk with a Heart of Gold main character finds the word "fuck" scrawled where young children can see it, and takes it upon himself to protect an innocent public by blotting it out. Censors reacted identically.
- Cutting Edge Ministries, home of the most massively convoluted Harry Potter Moral Guardianship ever. This is the site that drew some sort of evil monstrous connection between Harry's green eyes, green icing on a birthday cake, green ink on an invitation, Professor McGonagall's green cloak, and the unsourced assertion that green "is Satan's favorite color".
- Anthony Comstock, U.S. Postal Inspector at the turn of the last century was a moral guardian that went so far in the pursuit of his twisted moral code that he becomes High Octane Nightmare Fuel.
- America: The Book was banned from Wal-Mart for containing cut-out paper dolls of naked Supreme Court Justices. The reader was encouraged to cut out their robes and restore their dignity. Jon Stewart's first book, Naked Pictures Of Famous People, was also criticized for having naked Abe Lincoln on the front, and some later editions of the book have text-only covers.
- The Last Hurrah features Roger Sugrue, an upwardly-mobile, Harvard-educated Roman Catholic who pesters the Cardinal and makes it his personal business to decide what is and is not acceptable behavior for other Roman Catholics. The Cardinal, while he mostly agrees with Sugrue's assessment of such situations, nonetheless finds Sugrue to be an obnoxious ass in person.
- This is the thing that kicks off the main plot in Vivian Vande Velde's Heir Apparent novel. The titular character spends her birthday present (a gift certificate) on going to a video game arcade that is presently being picketed by a group called the Citizens To Protect Our Children (who believes only in G-rated movie making and that libraries should only stock nice, friendly, uplifting books). Soon after she goes into the game the protesters break inside and damage the building's video game equipment, including the game that the character is currently in. She's only got a few hours to win before the game fries her brain, and when she wakes up the head of the company (who, like her, is a teenager) mentions that "they're going to get their asses fried for endangering the welfare of a minor."
- An example of the darkest side of this trope occurred when Salman Rushdie published The Satanix Verses. The "moral" guardians murdered people and delared fatwas in this instance.
- In-universe example in Monstrous Regiment. The old women of Polly's home village (and, presumably, a lot of other Borogravian villages too) are notorious gossips, and spread the word far and wide about anything they disapprove of, and mostly what they disapprove of is not behaving according to the stringent and arbitrary principles of their religion; this, in a nation which has abusive corrective schools for girls who don't adhere strictly to the lifestyle (not to mention, one occasion sees Polly reflect upon her family's old pastor, who felt that women were living embodiments of all that said religion forbids, and ought to be abused regularly just for the principle of the thing).
- Averted with the eventual banning of Nanny Ogg's The Joye of Snacks, which was prohibited, not on moral grounds, but because it was found to trespass on the purview of the Guild of Seamstresses. Also, because the publisher's wife couldn't stop laughing about it.
- The subject of the short story Ado, which focuses on a Genre Savvy, Deadpan Snarker schoolteacher who wants to have the class read Hamlet. In this particular story, there's a moral group for just about everything, and they file complaints on lines in the story... resulting in it being cut down to about two out-of-context lines that the class is allowed to read. It also heavily implies that it's the Moral Guardians themselves that are damaging children - there's a student whose parents actively protest, and she uses the protests to simply go outside and tan and avoid schoolwork. She's quite Book Dumb as she can't spell anything, and despises having to edit her signs later due to the protests of another group, wondering where "free speech" went.
- In Midnight by Jacqueline Wilson, the heroine is a huge fan of a fantasy author/artist named Casper Dream. She mentions that his first book, about a fairy which appears in smoke clouds, was banned from shops because Moral Guardians were concerned that it encouraged children to smoke.
Live Action TV
- Sam the Eagle filled this role on The Muppet Show. At one time he delivered a speech about the immorality of animals who, under their fur, feathers, scales, etc., were walking around completely naked. His reaction as he realized he himself was a member of this sordid group was priceless.
- And then they openly parodied censors in a Muppets Tonite sketch entitled NYPD Green where a censor keeps popping up to object to everything the detectives said (Such as mentioning a filthy dirtbag. The case was about a stolen bag of dirt). Eventually Kermit shuts off the camera to protect the audience from the dirty imagination of the censor.
- The Parents Television Council is an unabashedly conservative group that masquerades as a nonpartisan organization, and has gone after a large number of targets since its founding in 1995. Almost every single current primetime network series has been given the highest possible rating on their website. In their mind, if a show has any form of sexual content in it, it's automatically pornographic. The group is almost singlehandedly (it has some help from the American Family Association) responsible for the recent tightening of "decency" regulations for broadcast TV in the wake of the Janet Jackson "wardrobe malfunction" at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show, better known as "Nipplegate". They've been known to take special aim at anyone who shows what they consider insufficient respect to conservative Protestant Christianity, and are currently intensifying efforts to bring cable TV under the same kind of regulation as broadcast. They have a strong lobby in Washington, and have been known to use astroturfing methods in their campaigns to censor and suppress content of which they disapprove.
- The PTC has affected at least one of their targets in a way they probably didn't intend; their targeting of WWE SmackDown! inspired WWE to create a stable called "Right To Censor" (universally referred to as RTC), a group of Moral Guardians who set out to combat sex and violence in WWE programming... literally, by beating the hell out of anybody who they deemed too offensive for TV. Even the other heels hated them.
- Naturally, The Onion used this chance to pour some acid on their wounds, as well as the science of "psychology" excuses as a whole: "U.S. Children Still Traumatized One Year After Seeing Partially Exposed Breast On TV". To think — some of them weren't even one year old... oh, the horror!
- mediawatch-uk (capitalization correct; definitely not to be confused with Australian TV show Media Watch) is, roughly speaking, the British equivalent to the Parents Television Council. Formerly the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, it was founded in 1965 by Mary Whitehouse and claims a membership of 40,000 (it counts dead members and anyone who sends letters to them). It espouses an aggressively conservative view of proper TV content and has advocated making the possession of pornography a crime punishable by jail time. Mary Whitehouse, now deceased, was 'honoured' by comedians Newman and Baddiel, who ironically named their 1990s sketch/stand-up series The Mary Whitehouse Experience.
- She was also parodied with Mrs. Desiree Carthorse in The Goodies, where she hired them to produce a "gender education" film. Despite it being censored to the point of ridiculousness (everyone and everything in the film was covered in white sheets), she still objected morally. At the end of the episode, she got her way, and all television was banned to stamp out "S-E (cross motions with finger)". The Goodies pointed out that, since there was no TV, everyone would be having sex anyway, so the episode ends with her running down the street, shouting into windows, "Stop it! Stop it!" The reason for the last was that Mrs W. had written to The Goodies complimenting them on their wholesome show, which annoyed them so much that they set out to offend her as often as possible from that point onwards.
- Spoofed on A Bit of Fry and Laurie, with a sketch where it turned out that "Perhaps the Mary Whitehouses of this world aren't as monumentally stupid as they appear at first, second, and twenty-third glance." A Running Gag on the show was that Stephen Fry would punch Hugh Laurie in the face, and there was a concern that people might emulate Stephen's behaviour... by punching Hugh. So instead, Stephen gave Hugh a pile of money, in the hope that all the impressionable people out there would imitate him.
- Another sketch had a Mary Whitehouse type figure objecting to the language in a previous sketch on the grounds that her children might have seen it..and it was only due to the good fortune that they hadn't yet been born that they hadn't seen it. What made this even more ridiculous was the fact that the bad language in the previous sketch consisted solely of Unusual Euphemisms. ('Cloffprunker')
- Monty Python took their own swipe at Mary Whitehouse in a live performance which happened to fall on Michael Palin's 30th birthday. As it also happened, Eric Idle's mum was a dead ringer for Ms. Whitehouse, and when the troupe brought her onstage to present Palin with a cake and flowers, he promptly thanked "the old bag herself for coming out," and stuffed the flowers into the cake.
- Stupid bit of trivia? Mary Whitehouse died on November 23rd, the same date that her long running target Doctor Who first premiered.
- Mary Whitehouse lost her position as the go-to-gal for knee-jerk alarmism when she libeled the mother of TV playwright Dennis Potter. She had long campaigned against his work, and gave an interview in which she claimed that the famously controversial graphic sex scene in The Singing Detective where the protagonist, as a young boy, catches his mother having adulterous sex in a forest, was literally autobiographical. Mrs Potter sued successfully, and Mary Whitehouse was no longer on speed-dial for the chat shows.
- National Coalition of Television Violence, an ally of Pat Pulling. Its founder and a research director Dr. Thomas Radecki, home-brewed theologist of Fundamentalist Christian strain bent on "investigating" Satanism and what he called "research". The latter included reviewing book reviewers and condemning those who "may not have been as sensitive to violence as they should have been", as well as reviewing "book covers of popular paperback books randomly selected from the shelves" in a bookstore to see how many of them he can call "violent". Yes, he freely admitted he used to judge a book by its cover. He warned about kids not knowing the difference between fantasy and reality and quoted a novel (Mazes and Monsters by Rona Jaffe) as a real document.
- The Catholic League claims to be "the nation's largest Catholic civil rights organization." In reality, it consists of a single person named William Donahue whose job is to get deeply offended at everything even slightly critical of Catholicism, then go on every talk show in America to tell everyone how offended he was. Of course, it doesn't help that the media, in true Cowboy Bebop At His Computer fashion, never bothers to let people know that the Catholic League has no official connection to the church. South Park subjected him to a hilariously cruel Take That in the "Fantastic Easter Special" episode.
- And of course, they object to things that Holy Mother Church has no problem with, such as natural selection.
- The Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies have a V-Chip Monitor on stage, who steps in to censor potentially offensive lectures or demonstrations.
- Parodied in this A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch where a Mary Whitehouse expy is incensed at all the fake swearing from the previous sketch, you fusking pimhole.
- Apparently soccer moms complained that Lord Zedd was too scary and the producers had to tone him down to appease them.
- Power Rangers has been fighting this since Day 1. People were complaining that the shows violent content was encouraging children to hurt themselves, and a rumor began that a kid died while he was playing Power Rangers with his friends (In fact, many countries censored or simply refused to broadcast the show because of this. In a cute twist of irony, until 2011 the only place where the show was still outright banned was New Zealand, where it's been filmed since 2002.) Nowadays, with the internet and violent video games, Power Rangers looks rather quaint by comparison, so Moral Guardians tend to just live and let live.
- Parodied on The Young Ones in a sketch that pokes fun at the boys-school series Grange Hill:
Mr. Liberal: Don't you realize that the way you act is influencing millions of children to talk Cockney and be insubordinate?
Student: Oh, come on, sir, don't be silly! Why, we're the only kids in Britain who never say "f—" {cut to next scene}
- Referenced in an episode of Bottom. After losing their television, Richie and Eddie decide to spend the evening playing chess instead which ends up in the usual mindless violence. As he's smashing Richie's head into the fridge, Eddie takes a moment to Break the fourth wall and point out to moral guardians who think that tv causes violence that in fact this particularly bout of violence is due to a lack of TV.
- The whole point of the character Marcia Langman on Parks and Recreation. She's a right-wing activist offended by everything, often for reasons based on Insane Troll Logic.
- Kamen Rider Amazon was canceled because of the Moral Guardians, apparently due to the fact that fights would end with the monster losing a limb or lots of blood as opposed to blowing up.
- Gilmore Girls was originally developed through Family Friendly Programming Forum’s (FFPF), and continued to receive funding from them. (Hence the The “Changes Everything” ad campaign.) How many shows can say they got approval from both the FFPF and NOW's Primetime Report?
- WKRP In Cincinnati addressed this in an episode, at a time when Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority was more active in media influence. In the episode, the station is approached by a similar minister, who gives Art Carlson a list of songs "we'd rather you not play" and threatens to start an advertising boycott if the station doesn't comply. At first Carlson agrees, but after the DJ's protest, he has second thoughts; he tests the group's motives by bringing them a copy of the lyrics to John Lennon's "Imagine" and asking if it, too, would be objectionable. When the minister says it would, Carlson decides to fight the group, even though it means the loss of several of the station's long-time advertisers.
- Father Ted was subject to criticism from those who viewed it as Anti-Irish. Many of these guardians were English people of Irish descent, a fact Graham Linehan thought to be a Wallbanger. Many also felt that the Catholic Church in Ireland was portrayed in a bad light. Gleefully parodied with their protest of an obscene film (The page image above) which only makes the film more popular
- On the Alfred Hitchcock anthology show, if the characters got away with a crime at the end of a story, Hitchcock would appear afterward to assure us and the nervous sponsors that the law had caught up to them and meted out justice.
- Then again, in one story about an alien invasion, he appeared behind bars, announcing that the aliens were very angry with him for exposing their Evil Plan in that night show.
- Degrassi: The Next Generation (which is mainly an ensemble drama) has had problems with this, in true Cowboy Bebop At His Computer fashion. In the early part of the series, Moral Guardians were convinced that Marco, a gay teen, was the main character of the series. Later they though this role belonged to yet another gay character, Riley Stavros. While in reality (so to speak), they wer both relativley minor characters.
- This was one of the major reasons MTV's version of Skins was canceled. People were going onto forums and speaking out against it as "child pornography". The actors were never filmed below the waist, and the most "explicit" form of "sex" shown was dry-humping.
- Round The Twist was almost banned in its home country Australia at the time of its premiere because it contained a lot of things deemed Harmful to Minors, such as death, nudity (including references to genitalia), underwear, incest (Kissing Under the Influence), mild sex references (and one episode — "Lucky Lips" — centered on a magic tube of lipstick that attracts females... and not just human females, either), and your typical gross-out humor staples (body odor, Toilet Humor [both urination and defecation] and plenty of vomit). It also had trouble being exported to Britain because of such subject matter.
- Glee has been getting a surprising amount of flak by Moral Guardians. While the show never tried to be shy about risque content, it's similarities to a popular film series aimed at children led a lot of people to initially (and some still do) believe the show was targeting children. Some of the particularly ridiculous criticisms were over risque magazine photoshoots featuring the actors who played teenage characters, even likening it to "pedophilia"... Even though the actors in question were in their mid-twenties when they did the photos! Pretty much all the criticism of the show's "inappropriate" content come from people who don't realize that the show is made for older teens and young adults.
Magazines
- On multiple occasions, the women's magazine Take A Break campaigns on social issues, but it's obvious that they did not do the research on these issues. Also, their agony aunt Katie tends to be guilty of this on multiple occasions, causing moral panic sometimes.
- A supermarket in Arkansas caught some flack when they used their "family shield" to cover a magazine cover that had Elton John, his husband and their new infant son in order "protect young shoppers", but eventually reversed their decision when they received complaints.
Music
- The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) were the infamous self-appointed moral crusaders against any kind of fun in music in the 1980s, formed by Tipper Gore and other wives of influential people when she was scandalized by lyrics to the Prince song "Darling Nikki" (a full account of the history behind the PMRC is given on Jello Biafra's spoken word recording High Priest of Harmful Matter). Their aim was soon set at the LA glam scene and metal in general, but although they lost influence, many others eventually took up the moral crusade against metal music, with equally stupid arguments ranging from a (false) accusation of backward lyrics in Judas Priest songs to blaming the recent Virginia Tech killings on the fact that the killer wrote a play which had the same name as a Guns N' Roses song. Many metal bands have written songs about the PMRC and censorship — Megadeth in particular have written several. Even more infamous was the day the PMRC called Dee Snider, front man for Twisted Sister, to testify, expecting him to make himself look foolish and further promote their cause. Snider showed up still in makeup from the previous night's show, hair teased and huge, dressed in ripped and torn clothing, possibly even hungover, with his notes in a crumpled wad. However, appearances are deceiving; Dee Snider is a very literate and eloquent man, with a strong sense of the poetic. He proceeded to verbally abuse the entire PMRC, up to and including implications that Tipper Gore was a closet sadomasochist, visibly angering Al Gore to the point of near incoherence. This was possibly the most epic defeat ever handed to the PMRC (not to mention a complete and total Crowning Moment of Awesome for Snider).
- Roger Waters, lyricist of Pink Floyd, savagely attacked Mary Whitehouse in a verse of "Pigs (Three Different Ones)" -
Hey you, Whitehouse, Ha ha charade you are!
You house proud town mouse,
Ha ha charade you are
You're trying to keep our feelings off the street
You're nearly a real treat,
All tight lips and cold feet,
And do you feel abused?
- Amanda Palmer's song "Guitar Hero" parodies the idea of a school shooting being inspired by a video game... particularly, well, Guitar Hero. The song shows how easily any game can be compared to real life violence (with the help of some Incredibly Lame Pun lines such as "It's a hit!" and "There's people screaming, just like they should / but you don't even know if you're good..."). Extra poignant because Amanda actually lost some of her friends during a school shooting - she just refuses to blame it on any part of pop culture.
- In the same vein is the song "Rockstar Games" by The Leetstreet Boys. Check out the lyrics Here (you'll have to scroll down a bit)
- There was a documentary about "the evils of rock and roll" called "Hell's Bells," which claimed that rock'n'roll makes children prone to violently killing people and that rock musicians are possessed by the Devil when they write and/or perform their songs. Among other things. Apparently it was over seven hours long. And hilarious.
- There was a sequel, released in 2001, titled "Hell's Bells 2." It suggested that many rock bands promoted La Veyan Satanism through their general attitude, even though most of the bands they described probably had little to no actual knowledge of La Vey.
- During the 80's there was a fellow by the name of Michael Mills who had a radio show devoted to finding Satanic messages in rock songs. Among the bands he accused of corrupting its listeners were the usual suspects like Kiss and Led Zeppelin but he also included a few head-scratchers like ELO, Bow Wow Wow, and of all people, Dan Fogelberg.
- Insane Clown Posse have a song called "Terrible," and one of the verses is an obvious Take That to Moral Guardians campaigning against music they deem unsavory.
"Oh my god, we've gotta protest that!
Let's march into his concert and chant 'em to hell,
Cause he's so fuckin TERRIBLE!
Meanwhile his record sales double and triple,
Cause of YOU whining bout him rubbing his nipple!
Religious? Shit, you helped them bands
Instead of helping them poor people eating outta them garbage cans.
When your done with that, bitch, come protest me!
Shit, muthafucka, I could use the money!"
- Katy Perry grew up in an extremely Christian household where the word "Devil" even in the context of "Devil's Food Cake" wasn't allowed. One might say this backfire horribly considering what Perry is now best known for.
- The verse "Superman that ho" of Soulja Boy's hit "Crank Dat" was thought to be about a depraved sex act. This caused lots of backlash from Moral Guardians everywhere thinking the song was promoting sexual acts. Turns out, that that's not what he intended and the meaning is based on an Urban Legend anyway.
- While his original usage of it may be true, the alternate definition has also become a viable usage through language evolution.
- Eels' Daisies Of The Galaxy was a fairly unlikely target for this sort of controversy: When promotional copies were given out at an event at the Democratic National Convention, both a New York Post article and the official site for George W. Bush's election typified it as "a compact disc clearly marketed towards children containing offensive language". The evidence it was being "marketed towards children" was that the cover art was drawn in a style reminiscent of a children's storybook, while the main things that were cited as offensive were the song title "It's A Motherfucker" and the lyric "when I grow up I'll be an angry little whore" (from "Tiger In My Tank"). In reality, the album is pretty tame for having a Parental Advisory sticker: "It's A Motherfucker" is a song about missing someone that happens to have the album's Precision F-Strike, and in context the phrase "angry little whore" was clearly being taken entirely too literally.
Newspaper Comics
- In Calvin and Hobbes Calvin finds some of their reports "very disturbing" — where's all the terrible stuff he's supposed to be seeing?
- Hilariously subverted in one Bloom County series: Opus' girlfriend's mother (who never liked him to begin with) sics the local priest on him, hoping to get some outrage because Opus is part of a death metal band. But the priest turns out to be a very nice fellow with an excellent sense of humor, and he actually likes Opus' music (saying of the song "Let's Guillotine Grandma", "Something to slip into the hymns next Sunday!"). The end of the series shows the mother very upset as the priest tries to gently calm her down.
- FoxTrot parodies this with Andy being a member of the group MAGG (Mothers Against Gory Games) and only allowing Peter to play MAGG-approved games, which include Nice City, Pacifist Man, Resident Good, and Eternal Lightness. She also complains at one point about how Donkey Kong is not wearing pants.
- In another series of strips, Andy buys a "MomVo", which does things like shutting down the TV after showing a certain amount of cartoons, or forcibly changing the channel from "trash TV" to PBS. Eventually she gets rid of it when it blocks out her soap operas too ("You should have seen how fast she yanked the cables," Jason remarks).
- Another story arc has her objecting to the "Doomathon II" game that Jason gets for Christmas, only to end up getting addicted to it.
- This is a Running Gag with Andy; it's practically formula that if she starts up some kind of moral crusade, the crusade will end either with her completely rejecting it once it begins to inconvenience her, or being sucked in by whatever she was crusading against.
- Zits brings this up occasionally, usually with Jeremy's parents, Walt and Connie, filling the roles.
- One strip has Connie preaching (quite literally) to Jeremy while watching TV, dressed in a New England Puritanical Era outfit speaking in manner from the time. In the last panel, Jeremy says, "Don't be such a prude, Mom, it's just an episode of South Park.
- Another strip has Jeremy listening to music with his headphones replaced by garbage cans in one panel and toilets in the next with Connie making comments on the side about the content.
- In another strip, Walt gets angry at a song Jeremy is listening to, resulting in this exchange,
Walt: Did I hear what I think I just heard?!
Jeremy: Dad, it's just a song lyric.
Walt: Don't give me that! I'm sick of this new music that's nothing but drugs and sex!
Connie: Ouch. One point for the teenager.
- Subverted in another arc where Connie hears some of the content of Jeremy's music and wants to have a look through his CD collection, resulting in Jeremy going off on a rant, only for Connie to declare that the music is fine.
Newspapers
- The Sun, a British tabloid newspaper, is well known for this. In 2008 it led a successful campaign to force social networking site Facebook to remove an application which allowed users to virtually "shank" (knife) friends. It also led a moral crusade in 1992 against the horror movie Child's Play 3 which, it was argued, was responsible for the murder of 2-year-old James Bulger because the family of one of the 10-year-old killers had rented the movie shortly beforehand. Police could find no evidence of this and said so in a press statement, but the newspaper led a nationwide campaign for anyone with a copy of the film to destroy it and for shopkeepers to remove it from shelves. Child's Play 3 was later suggested as a possible inspiration for another murder, which allowed The Sun to say "See? We were right."
- The Daily Express, with an equally vitriolic attitude towards immigration, asylum seekers and the European Union. Has a particular fixation with conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Princess Diana, and is known as the "Di-ly Express" in Private Eye.
- the Daily Star provides an excellent example about how this can backfire◊. The show they were angry about was Brass Eye, a satirical sketch show.
- The Daily Mail is another Right Wing Tabloid in a similar vein to the Daily Express and is infamous in the UK for "raging" over many moral issues including Immigration, Education, Video Games, Television content, The Daily Express, and so on. One particularly noteworthy attack was the Ban These Evil Games◊ front page from back in 2004, when they linked a child's murder to video gaming in general, describing them as "Poisoning Young Minds."
Professional Wrestling
- CM Punk's heel character is something of a Moral Guardian. He spends a lot of time chastising the audience (or other wrestlers) on their debauched and indulgent lives full of drugs and partying while saying his life of purity and abstinence makes him "better than you". In WWE he takes this to a cult-like level by leading around a troupe of "converts" who accept and endorse the hardline Straight Edge way while doing anything Punk demands.
- There was once Right To Censor, which seemed to be a Take That against actual moral guardians, but still playing into the wishes of the Real Life censors.
Radio
- Parody example: Mr. Tweedly, the friendly radio censor who insists Stan Freberg Bowdlerise "Old Man River" into "Elderly Man River" for the sake of "the tiny tots", which predated the political correctness trope by decades.
- That sketch was more about being grammatically correct than politically correct, with "He don't plant taters" replaced by "He doesn't plant potatoes" and the like.
Tabletop Games
- Patricia Pulling, mother of Irving "Bink" Pulling (who committed suicide on June 8, 1982), alleged that her son's suicide was caused by roleplaying games, a common accusation of the time (Irving Pulling was noted to be having troubles fitting in at school, and wrote "Life is a Joke" on a blackboard at school shortly before his suicide). Pulling tried to sue the principal of the high school her son attended, then got a private investigator certificate and formed B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons), testified as a self-proclaimed expert in "occult" and D&D, and riding a wave of "cult crimes" scare, produced handouts for police that contained erroneous or outright false statements (such as claiming that 8% of Richmond, Virginia citizens were Satanists; she came to this conclusion by estimating 4% of teens and 4% of adults, and adding the result. And a list of fantasy role-playing games, some of which weren't fantasy, or role-playing games, or at all). She has an objection to Tunnels and Trolls that it used rolls of three six-sided dice, so here must be something Satanic. Somehow she was allowed to get away with everything up to unauthorized and re-edited reprinting of newspapers articles and even was hired to give testimony in a court of law. Pulling died of cancer in 1997, and the anti-RPG backlash more or less died with her.
- To make it more ridiculous, there are studies (including some done by B.A.D.D. itself) that show that D&D players are actually less likely to commit suicide. This makes sense; to play D&D at all, you need to have at least two friends.
- Jack Chick, of course, had a rather famous tract about how Dungeons & Dragons leads to suicide and satanism.
- The Swedish book De övargivandes Arme (Army of the Abandoned) from 1997 claimed that role-playing was secretly a front for neo-Nazi indoctrination and training in guerilla warfare. Although the book's arguments were mainly of the Hitler Ate Sugar variety (e.g. that White Wolf sounded kinda Nazi-ish), it did provoke a couple of M Ps to demand age codes on RPGs, before the debate died down.
- Magic: The Gathering. Summoning angels and demons, even if they're a small number of the cards.
- As part of Early Installment Weirdness, Magic: the Gathering included many references to the real world, classical mythology and/or religion. That faded partly because of a devotion to their own world-building and intellectual property, but also to placate Moral Guardians who didn't like upside-down burning pentagrams appearing in card art. The different is particularly glaring between one printing of the card Unholy Strength and another, in which the art of the later version is missing the pentagram that takes up the entire background of the picture but is otherwise identical.
Theatre
- Theatre has a long history of being banned or closed in the Christian world for reasons of immorality. John Calvin and Oliver Cromwell come to mind, as do most Puritan sects, but most forms of theatre (Church commissioned morality play being the exception) were banned throughout most of the Middle Ages. Arguments explaining why theatre is evil and/or useless go back at least as far as Plato, and the opposition dates back at least as far as Aristotle.
- Arsinoé, in Molière's Le Misanthrope, is a prudish old woman who seeks to limit Célimène's pleasures, largely because she is jealous of her with Alceste. Molière's Tartuffe is also morally censorious, at one point draping a handkerchief over Dorine's overly exposed bosom (though he is, of course, a complete hypocrite, and tries to seduce Oronte's wife behind his back). Molière suffered a great deal from Real Life Moral Guardians.
- The unseen Mrs. Grundy, in Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough, in which Dame Ashfield continually worries, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" of each development, has passed into everyday speech as the embodiment of prudery and censorship.
- Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, regarded as the first true feminist play, was criticized for challenging traditional gender roles and the sanctity of marriage, with most criticism being aimed particularly toward the female protagonist, Nora, who leaves her husband and children behind in order to start a new life of self-discovery at the end of the original play. The ending was criticized so much that an alternative version of the play was performed, with Nora giving her husband a second chance and staying with him at the end of the play. Nowadays, all performances of this play use the original ending. Ibsen, who was not happy with being forced to write an alternative ending to the play and considering it a travesty, included a pointed Take That to his critics, in that the "happy" ending is only achieved thanks to the husband bullying and emotionally guilt-tripping his wife into staying through their children, and the wife makes it very clear that she considers staying A Fate Worse Than Death.
Toys
- The Lion and Lamb Project is the counterpart for children's toys. The main problem with their crusade against immoral toys is the massive amount of Did Not Do the Research involved in their tirades; the group constantly claims that various toys were marketed at children simply because of the "Ages 3 and Up" approval rating on all toys (which is the result of a safety test, not a demographic statement). They went straight into Cowboy Bebop At His Computer territory by claiming that a Transformers toyline was clearly designed to tie in to The Matrix despite the fact that the two franchises have no corporate connection and only shared the unimportant background premise of a background Big Bad draining energy from living beings. Their lists of "recommended" toys make it clear that they think that toys are never, ever made for anybody older than 4 or so despite the blatant pandering to collectors' markets in many toylines. Their website has not been updated in years, possibly due to the increasing irrelevance of physical toys.
Video Games
- In the 1990s, the Brazilian Ministry of Justice forbid sales of the Carmageddon series and the first Grand Theft Auto. But in the 2000s they entered Culture Police level by banning Bully, ("doesn't let children to be educated properly", according to the judge who ordered the ban) Counter-Strike ("violence stimulation") and EverQuest ("subversion of social order").
- Of course since this is Brazil everyone more or less ignores the orders.
- Fallout 3 was originally going to have morphine as one of its chems, but a complaint about the portrayal of morphine in the game from Australian Moral Guardians got it changed to Med-X while still coming in rather recognizable syringes. The way it was portrayed? As an extremely potent but dangerously addictive painkiller... which is kind of what morphine is.
- The Grand Theft Auto series is a repeated target of Moral Guardians. Several entries have been denied release internationally, including in parts of Japan. This came to a particularly explosive head in San Andreas when hackers discovered a disabled sex minigame (dubbed "Hot Coffee") that led to Jack Thompson (again) patrolling the media with his anti-gaming theories, as well as facetime from numerous lawmakers including Senator Hillary Clinton, who proposed laws to restrict the sales of certain games. Clinton and Thompson even appeared together several times to fight against the game.
- The Hot Coffee incident was spoofed by Jak X: the unlockable Hot Coffee video features Daxter and Tess drinking coffee, before Daxter looks at the screen and asks, "What?"
- GTA IV was nearly banned in Australia, but it got through after they took out a module that allowed your character to have sex with prostitutes. However, it still contains extreme violence, drug use, male full frontal nudity, and you can still have sex. Just not with prostitutes.
- Women's magazine Take A Break has recently published an article on how Grand Theft Auto is disrespectful to women because it's possible to kill prostitutes in the game. Of course it features the inevitable "It's bad for our children!" argument and conveniently neglecting to mention its 18 rating. They are currently saying they want it censored, but at the same time praising the Thai government for banning it outright.
- Jack Thompson is a self-appointed crusader against video games, and apparently blames them for every evil affecting American society except possibly global warming and the common cold. Before that he was involved in efforts to censor music, specifically rap. He has a history of rabid overreaction to his pet issue-of-the-moment, vitriol towards more rational persons on any side of that issue, and legal threats to anyone who disagrees with him (his lawsuits have expanded to include the Florida Supreme Court as a target). However, he was considered to be relatively harmless, as his rants cost him his credibility and, eventually, his license to practice law; with more important people making threats against video games, Thompson was merely the most visible and possibly the most entertaining.
- Eternal Forces: managed to cause offense on both sides. The non-religious community objected because they saw it as conservative Christian propaganda, and the Religious Right disliked the game because it portrayed the faithful as trigger-happy vigilantes.
- Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman studies how video games can train people to kill. He cites tactics used in shooting games, desensitising gamers to killing and portraying it as a reward and enjoyment as evidence. For the record, he's also quite fond of citing reports on video game violence that cite him as their primary source.
- Left 4 Dead 2 was given an R18+ rating in Australia for, among other reasons "high-impact violence" and "piles of bodies lay about the environment". The problem with this? Australia does not have an R18+ rating for games, meaning that any game which would rate over an MA 15+ is "Refused Classification". Valve submitted a censored version of the game to the classification board, which was eventually passed with an MA-15 rating. The amount of censoring required is so ridiculous though, that at times it looks like a completely different game. Valve had also resubmitted the original for reconsideration, but it was just given another dose of refused classification. It could be argued that at least they tried, but the gamers won't be any happier.
- You can get an uncensored version there now. The hubub about the game being too violent has died down significantly, though I imagine this is the case for most games.
- The release of Bully on the PS2 (renamed Canis Canem Edit in the UK, at least in part over this fuss) was accompanied by a "ban this game" campaign led by disgraced former Cabinet Minister Keith Vaz.
- This mainly occurred during the game's development, as upon release such detractors were left with egg on their face when Bully turned out to be fairly wholesome, due to the fact that the path to victory is playing morally, being a good student and taking down the titular bullies. This was pretty much what caused the Jack Thompson media flareup to finally die down. Bully: Scholarship Edition has since been released in the UK under its original title.
- The original Manhunt received much controversy over how the game practically reveled in the violence the player could commit. This led to the game being banned in several countries. The sequel received the same treatment, including such notable names as Hillary Clinton and Jack Thompson attempting to get the game restricted in the United States. The game still had to be recut because the ESRB gave the first cut an Adults Only rating, thus leading to retailers refusing to carry it and Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft all denying the games release on their platforms. Even after the M-rated cut made it shelves, the same moral guardians sought to have the game re-rated and pulled from store shelves.
- The game's sequel, Manhunt 2, was actually banned in Ireland and in the UK; though without any kind of controversy associated with the sequel, at least not on a level comparable to that of the original.
- The guardians had another video game field day with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. More precisely, the Wham Level "No Russian", where you play as a CIA agent going undercover with terrorists massacring an entire airport. Predictably, they took the level out of context and claimed the whole game to be a terrorism simulator on that alone. The twist is, putting the stage within context is a gigantic spoiler... one that would make the guardians' heads implode: The whole massacre was planned by the true Big Bad, US Army General Shepherd, as the beginning of his utterly vile, corrupt and insane Batman Gambit to begin a horrific war between America and Russia so that he can instill total American supremacy upon the world and get his name down in history as a (false) war hero.
- The German Moral Guardians actually took some action and forced the developers to punish the player for shooting the civilians in that level with a Game Over in the German-language version. This also resulted in Steam (and the game won't run without it) forbidding players who bought the German-language version (and the conveniently country-coded CD key with it) to download any other languages for it, which is possible for every other game out there.
- The infamous level was cut from the Russian release. Nevertheless, a parliament deputy proposed to ban the game, because his teenage son was apparently outraged by the level. The Russian publisher, 1C, responded with a sarcastic open letter, inquiring why the politician would buy his son a pirated game and ignore the "18 and over" mark on the front cover.
- While nowhere near as bad as Stephen Conroy's Orwellian nightmare of a proposal (under "Internet", above), in late 2008, Michael Atkinson (the South Australian Attorney-General) withdrew support for a discussion on giving Australia an R18+ Video Game Rating. Not the rating itself, but a discussion on it. Not only are Australian citizens being disallowed a mature rating for video-games (a change would require unanimous agreement from all Attorneys-General), but actual proper debating of its pros and cons is being stopped dead by one man.
- Atkinson's gone. The R18+ rating is being introduced, but now there's a new issue: Mr. Rau, the new SA Attorney-General, has stated that he will remove the MA-15 rating in SA and force all games that would get that rating to be rated R18+. Still far less of a problem.
- The Pokémon franchise has had to bear probably the greatest onslaught of Moral Guardian complaining in recent years. Not only did various Moral Guardians accuse it of promoting satanism and witchcraft (due to the game's premise of being able to control "superpowered creatures"), but it also was accused of promoting gambling (to the point where some NPCs were changed from being called "gambler" to "gamer") and "cockfighting" (despite the fact that the in-game point of Pokémon is friendship and teamwork rather than "use your monsters to beat up the other guy's monsters").
- In addition to the above, some have accused it of being "evolutionist propaganda", in spite of the fact that "evolution" in Pokemon is nothing like real evolution.
- The colorless energy symbol in the TCG is similar to a Star of David, getting it banned in Saudi Arabia as "Zionist propaganda". The ADL complained about a "swastika" on a Trainer card, which was actually meant to be an omote manji, a Buddhist symbol of good luck.
- In a delightfully caustic Take That to the good decade or so of Moral Guardians complaining in the franchise's history, the villains in Pokémon Black and White are a gang known as Team Plasma, a polarizing group that aims to forcibly separate people from their Pokémon for the same reasons as real Moral Guardians intend with pretty much everything (for good measure, they're dressed as literal Knights Templar and their logo resembles the Chi Rho). Even better, they're almost entirely hypocrites; only one of them, their official leader N Harmonia, has any actual altruism behind this villainy, the leader who is actually pulling the strings, Ghestis, is a Complete Monster who intends to use Pokémon to dominate a world where no one else is allowed to use them, and the grunts are just casually cruel and support Ghetsis' intentions.
- The newest Medal of Honor game has been banned from stores on military bases for allowing gamers to play as the Taliban. While this is a question of sensitivity, you could play as Nazis in the previous installments. This may be a case of Too Soon.
- The Church of England criticised the PlayStation 3 game Resistance: Fall of Man, which included a gunfight in Manchester Cathedral. Amusingly, when the Church demanded that Insomniac change the game to not depict Manchester Cathedral, Insomniac reportedly laughed at them, and began pointing out the numerous other things that the Church did not have a problem with, including the violent depictions of murder. The Church was, sadly, not suitably chastised. Also funny: the Church's argument was—at least in part—that Insomniac didn't get their permission, which made the whole thing look more like a copyright dispute than a case of moral outrage. (Needless to say, having been built in 1215, Manchester Cathedral isn't subject to copyright of any kind.)
- And the Cathedral was even shown to have been used as an emergency hospital, but the Church is apparently not okay with that...
- As of late, even Portal 2 has been the target of Moral Guardians, with claims that it is offensive to adopted children, somehow completely ignoring that the entire point is that the obvious antagonists - who also make fat jokes - are the ones making the claims.
- Family Friendly Gaming, a review website that attempts to analyze video games and other media "from a family-friendly (read: conservative Christian) perspective." Short of downright demonizing the media itself, Family Friendly Gaming follows many of the guidelines of the stereotypical Moral Guardian.
- In a bizarre aversion, despite coming out the same year as the Mass Effect controversy, Persona 3 received absolutely no attention from the Moral Guardians whatsoever. This is in spite of the game containing teacher/student dating, a game mechanic in which children shoot themselves in the head multiple times per battle, a giant green penis chariot summon, and the Personas Satan, Lucifer, and Beelzebub. The game rightly received an award from Electronic Gaming Monthly for this achievement.
Webcomics
- Yes, that's right. A few months ago, a "fandom secret" image circulated Tumblr claiming that somehow, Homestuck glorifies and encourages an unhealthy lifestyle of internet use, and it deserves to be rebelled against. Thankfully it's pretty much restricted to just the one image with no (known) large concerted effort against the series, and everyone - including several members of Homestuck's art and music teams - just took the piss out of the claims mercilessly.
Western Animation
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