Nader, Nawal and baby Naseem from All-American Muslim. (Photo courtesy of TLC.)
By Ralph De La Cruz
Florida Center for Investigative Reporting
Irony has the power to elevate even something as artistically vulgar and culturally insignificant as reality TV into relevance, maybe even importance.
Irony is what happened to The Learning Channel’s All-American Muslim. The reality TV series follows a Muslim family in Dearborn, Mich., in an attempt to show that Muslims are people too.
When the show first began airing, the Hollywood Reporter wrote: “Unlike so many concocted reality shows, whose conflicts seem dreamed up by producers to stir up ratings, All-American Muslim needs no tricks or gimmicks. You come away from the show having broadened your understanding for a sector of, yes, American life that you may not have had much contact with before.”
It’s a quaint enough premise with a noble goal — to combat the false perceptions and prejudices that Muslims have to deal with post 9/11. But in these days of Kim Kardashian/Real Wives’ sex-and-celebrity reality TV, All-American Muslim was unable to avoid the TLC ratings cellar on Sunday nights.
And then it got Floridated. A conservative religious-oriented group from Tampa, the Florida Family Association, staged an e-mail campaign asking its supporters to demand companies pull their advertising from the show, or face a boycott. And All-American Muslim suddenly became less TV and more reality.
That’s because the home improvement store chain Lowe’s — a company with millions of customers and billions in sales (in the second quarter alone, Lowe’s had sales of $14.5 billion) — actually bowed to pressure from a Florida group that purports on its website to have “thousands of supporters.”
Floridians, particularly those in the Tampa Bay area, have become familiar with the antics of the Florida Family Association, in particular the incendiary words and actions of its founder and executive director, David Caton.
Caton is a former accountant and self-described recovering porn addict-turned-moral arbiter. In the name of “educating people on what they can do to defend, protect and promote traditional biblical values” (that motto is even listed on the group’s tax-exempt IRS filing), Caton has spent the past 23 years promoting a virulently anti-gay campaign.
He may have given up porn, but he certainly hasn’t given up his fixation on sex, particularly anything having to do with gays and the transgendered. He has fought benefits for same-sex couples, Gay Days at Disney, gay candidates, high school clubs for gay kids.
And it seems there hasn’t been a U.S. company he hasn’t tried to strong-arm into following his positions.
Until now, Caton has mostly been an annoyance to folks in the Central Florida/Tampa Bay area. The gadfly who’s always stirring a lot of pots but never quite gets anything cooked.
Same-sex benefits passed. The teen TV show Degrassi, a popular target of Caton because it dares to have gay characters, is still hugely popular and not in danger of being pulled. As the FFA website notes with outrage, the well-attended Gay Days will still go on next summer at Disney.
And his anti-gay exhortations are not likely to gain much footing. A 2010 Gallup poll found that a majority of Americans now view gay/lesbian relationships as morally acceptable.
So Caton has recently turned his attention to hard-right conservative issues such as opposition to high speed rail. And he found a new bogeyman: Muslims.
Earlier this year he tried to whip the accidental death of Fatima Abdallah into a campaign against Islam, calling it an Islamic “honor killing” despite repeated assertions by police and the medical examiner that it was properly ruled an accidental death.
And then, along came All-American Muslim and Lowe’s curious decision to take Caton seriously. A decision that, interestingly, may have been the best thing to happen to the show and the worst thing to happen to Lowe’s, which is now facing a backlash from more broad-minded customers.
Caton can now take his rightful place alongside orange juice queen Anita Bryant and Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones as discredited symbols of Florida intolerance.