Mary Tyler Moore Idol NO MORE -- A Response to a Parade Magazine Interview:
I grew up watching without fail Mary Tyler Moore shows. Laura Petrie and Mary Richards reflected their times. They showed a moral goodness, innocence and a beauty that was what we thought life was like in this country. She sat high, for many years, on the pedestal I built for her until I read the Sunday Parade Magazine interview. I was surprised -- NO I was shocked -- to read about Mary's political support. I simply could NOT believe it. We all have a right to our opinion, no doubt. I, though, believe one's political beliefs ARE one's principles and one's principles are one's character.
I could not understand her support of Republican candidates most especially John McCain with his insipid side-kick Sarah Palin nor could I at all understand the excuse she used for George W. Bush's unconscionable and egregiously immoral stand on stem cell research. I was not angry. I was simply disappointed. It is beyond my imagination how a person nearly killed by the onslaught of diabetes and alcoholism, one who has suffered so many internal struggles and so much tragedy could support candidates whose sympathies for the feelings and conditions of others are so lacking.
Ms. Moore's inability to realize the necessity and the value of our Constitutional separation of church state clause is also staggering to me . It is the height of irony that a woman who needed most the advocacy for her plights would eschew candidates who could give just that to her. I, too, could not understand a woman of the theater, who most definitely in her career must have known many homosexual people, yet throws her support to candidates whose so called "moral" position on homosexuality would be that those people either not exist, deny their feelings or deny their rights which other American citizens take for granted. It is unconscionable to me that a woman of her stature could not think about the people she supports and look with suspicion on the company they keep. I might, respectfully, tell her, too, that George Bush did NOT reject embryonic stem cell research BECAUSE he “had an obligation to his religion …” On the contrary; others who have known him relate that he truly held weak religious belief. He USED religious belief, however, to appeal to a base he thought he needed to attain political power.
Ms. Moore's diabetes at this moment in time COULD have been cured IF George Bush had not been president wasting eight years while lines of stem cells were thrown in the trash. Those lines could have helped cure her diabetes and Michael Fox's Parkinson's and Chris Reeves’s paralysis and even MY paralysis from polio and millions of others who suffer from hideous diseases every day of their life. Chris Reeve could possibly be alive today if it were not for George W. Bush. George Bush had NO trouble sending thousands to their death but could not see fit to protect full term human life. This, Ms. Moore, says is because of his moral compass. I say WHAT moral compass. He had none.
It is sad in our time to see our idols fall from grace but fallen she has at least from MY Mt. Olympus. I wish her well but I SURELY hope those whom she supports as political candidates NEVER in this country and in MY time again gain the immense power they once had to create the kind of destruction we see today. Our president now may be our country's LAST chance to redeem its image; an image that was reflected by the innocence and beauty of the television of which, for so many years, Ms. Moore was a part. It is sad for me to see that she is not exactly who I thought she was.
