SA GLAAD SUPPORTS TOPTV PORN BID

Christina Engela from the South African Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (SA GLAAD) has come out in support of TopTV’s bid to launch three porn channels.

On Digital Media (ODM), which runs TopTV, aimed to launch the Playboy channels as an additional service to its pay-TV subscribers this week but was forced to put its plans on hold after the broadcasting regulator Icasa brought an urgent interdict against it.

Icasa now plans to hold public hearings on whether it should approve the channels or not.

The broadcaster’s plans have been slammed by religious organisations, including the notoriously anti-gay Family Policy Institute (FPI), headed by Pastor Errol Naidoo, who is running a campaign against the channels and threatening a boycott of TopTV.

“If TopTV succeeds in launching porn channels in SA, It will open the floodgates for other broadcasters to open the sewers and release a flood of filth into our communities,” wrote Naidoo on the FPI website. “Despite TopTV’s assurances of parental controls, it will not stop sexually depraved adults from sexually abusing women and children.

“FPI is working diligently with government to block pornography on the internet & remove it from TV. The terrible harm to men, women & children is well documented. Porn must be eradicated!” insisted Naidoo.

Engela, however, wrote to TopTV defending the broadcaster’s right to launch the channels.

“…it is in the interests of viewer choice, supply and demand and the constitutional right to freedom of expression of citizens of this country, and your paying customers, to get what they want,” she said.

Noting that TopTV would “put appropriate safeguards in place so that parents can prevent their children from watching sexually explicit material” she slammed the “religious extremist Christianist agenda to dictate to the rest of the world what they may or may not do, think, hear, watch or enjoy in their own time, in their own privacy and at their own cost without harming anyone else around them”.

Engela added: “I vehemently oppose all attempts by any religious groups and vociferous individuals to curtail the freedom of expression in South Africa!”

The Film and Publication Board, which appears to be increasingly backing faith-based organisations’ conservative values, has said that it is “going to strongly oppose the channels and the pornography plans and we will be engaging Icasa about it”.

On Wednesday, Cosatu came out against the channels, saying that they would “reinforce sexist attitudes and encourage the abuse of women, which is already a massive problem”.