In the eye of the beholder - experiences of video store owner who run out of business by religious boycotters - First Person

Humanist, Sept-Oct, 1998 by Ken Tipton

My wife and I were your typical all-American young couple with visions of raising a family and starting a business of our own. I was a computer engineer at IBM and Carol was a registered nurse. Among the many things we had in common, one passion stood out: a love of movies. And this is what induced us in 1981--using money we'd originally saved for a house--to open the first video rental store in St. Louis, Missouri. It was a tremendous risk, and we soon experienced tough going as we struggled to balance a new baby and a new business. But we believed in the American dream and worked hard. And eventually our Video Library operation grew to six stores and was named by Video Store magazine as one of the top one hundred video outlets in America for the years 1984 to 1987. We had revenues of over $1.5 million.

During the early growth of our company, however, we were visited numerous times by a group of religious people who were followers of the Reverend Donald Wildmon. Wildmon's organization was at that time the National Federation for Decency (NFD); today it is the American Family Association. Wildmon had already succeeded in getting the 7-11 convenience store chain to remove Playboy from its racks and had called for a boycott of Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues television series. Later, Wildmon would call for a boycott of Bochco's NYPD Blue, as well as TV sitcoms as varied as Roseanne and Ellen. Today his organization urges boycotting Disney for its employee policy of giving health benefits to same-sex partners and for its production of various films disliked by the religious right.

Anyway, Wildmon's local NFD members insisted that we remove from our stores such movies as Taxi Driver, Porky's, Summer of '42, Agnes of God, Blazing Saddles, Animal House, The Priest, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, and many more. They were particularly incensed by the Touchstone (Disney) feature Splash, claiming that it promoted bestiality because Tom Hanks makes love to a mermaid, played by Darryl Hannah. Despite their complaints and demands, however, we ignored them and continued renting all these videos to the public.

Then, in 1988, Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ was released on video. By that time, I had become cofounder and vice-president of the St. Louis chapter of the Video Software Dealers Association. And I was the only video store owner in St. Louis whose outlets would carry this controversial film. After Wildmon's followers again made their desires known, and after we refused to remove this film, or any other, pressure was put on George Peach, the city prosecutor, to file charges against us for promoting obscenity--not for carrying The Last Temptation of Christ, mind you, but because we also had an "adult" video section in our stores.

I wasn't very concerned about these obscenity charges, though. Our small "adult" collection wasn't X-rated. The films we carried were what are called "cable version" videos--ones that have been edited to an R rating for showing in hotels and on cable services like Home Box Office and Showtime. Nonetheless, in anticipation of the trial, local NFD members declared war on us with pickets and boycotts. My employees were harassed, my stores were vandalized, and there were a number of bomb threats.

But it was on March 22, 1988, that the seriousness of the whole matter really hit home. A caller made death threats against my children. Demanding the removal of a whole list of films he found blasphemous, this caller declared that, since the sins of the father should not be passed on to the children, if I didn't remove the offending films, he would send my daughter "Laura" and my son "Paul.... back to God" so they could be reborn to Christian parents. The fact that the caller knew my children's names shocked me to the core, and I took this threat extremely seriously.

In addition, before and during the two trials that were held, our friends distanced themselves from us and we were subtly encouraged not to participate in many of the civic and social functions we'd been involved with for many years. Meanwhile, our children were taunted at school and neighbors wouldn't allow their kids to associate with them. Much of this was because the prosecutor had made damning statements to the media about our possible involvement with "organized crime." Though we eventually won both of our court cases, the negative publicity and legal fees bankrupted my business, as well as my family. Soon Carol and I divorced.

After that, I was unemployable and in the deepest of depressions; suicide seemed like the only answer. So one night I filled a large cup with all the medication I could find, swallowing mouthfuls of pills with wine. Turning on the TV to take my mind off the thoughts of the moment, I began watching a rerun of L.A. Law called "Splatoon." In this episode, people were participating in corporate paintball, a game where players run around the woods in military getup shooting special guns at each other that fire paint-filled projectiles. In the story, Stuart Markowitz, played by Michael Tucker, was having a tough personal time, but this game turned him from Markowitz into "Rambo-witz."