Religion & Beliefs

I'm a writer, so I work out of my apartment. Most of the other residents of my building are 9-5ers, so I enjoy very quiet workdays. But, sometimes one of my upstairs neighbors is home during the day, too, and is so very noisy and so sometimes I turn on the television to cancel out her midday dance club or the late evening rendezvous she enjoys with her boyfriend (whom she praises during such rendezvous by first and last name).

Anyway, that's not the issue. I turned on the television for some white noise and landed on TLC. I don't remember what show made me stop on that channel, nor was I paying much attention to the programming all morning, but it was on and canceling out the noise from above, for the most part.

I make a point to take a moment and step away from my desk for lunch usually, or at least I try to most days, and as I did this, I got sucked into a show called A Wedding Story and was prompted to write a letter to the network. A Wedding Story is as the title would suggest– the story of a couple getting the last-minute stuff together for their wedding and this particular episode was of Sarah (Christian from the US, her family is from the US) and Kamir (Muslim from the US, his family is from Morocco) who decided to have two destination weddings, one a protestant ceremony (which seemed pretty secular) and the other Muslim. During the early segment of the show, captions indicated the choice the couple made to have two weddings with the caption, "Two weddings. One Islamic. The other American."

Blink, blink. Blink.

Granted, I like to pick my battles, but this wording really bothered me because the implications were so culturally insensitive. Really, consider the implications. Is Islam a place? Is American a religion? Okay, I'm being a smart-ass, but really, this usage indicates that American is the same as Christian and, well, it isn't. With this wording, one has to assume TLC takes to position that "American wedding" excludes Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Wiccan– and any other wedding tradition that isn't Christian? It might be, and probably is, a simple matter of semantics, an oversight maybe, but for it to air, a lot of people within the network had to see it and either not be bothered by it, not care enough to speak up or not even realize what it implied. I doubt the bride and groom saw the show prior to it airing, and so I wonder, too, what the groom thought? He probably felt marginalized at the implication that Muslim didn't qualify as American. How could he not?

So, I wrote an email to the network. It was a calm, polite email that asked for a reply in the matter, so while the network probably doesn't give a shit about my letter and will never respond, if they do, you'll be the first to hear about it.

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