Penn and Teller: Bullshit! – The first four episodes from the 2006 Showtime season, beginning with the Boy Scouts. (After Cub Scouts I became a Webelow – get it, “we below” or peons – before quitting.) Penn Jillette, a former Scout but now the leader of Bull Shitters of America, points out that the Boy Scouts of America (five million boys) were kidnapped by the religious right and the Mormon Church in the early 1980s, giving the organization an anti-homosexual and anti-atheism agenda. (Connecticut reacted against the BSA’s anti-gay stance by denying the organization participation in the state-employee charity drive in 2002.) In what should be a violation of federal law, the BSA gets tax-dollar support (meetings often held in schools and other government-funded locations) as a public institution while practicing discrimination as if it were a private club. With their teaching adolescent males hatred and discrimination and that duty to God comes before country, others, and self, Penn suggests that the BSA’s program may be ideal for training suicide bombers. In Survivor meets Queer Eye, three straight young men compete against three gay young men at various scouting skills. James Dale, a gay former Eagle Boy Scout, has sued the BSA unsuccessfully. Enrollment has fallen off 13% over the past five years.

Next Penn and Teller investigate prostitution. There are about one million prostitutes in the US, or nearly one of every 150 females, which means one for nearly every 150 guys of all ages. (How many men actually visit prostitutes wasn’t revealed. For the record, I never have.) Prior to 1910 prostitution was legal in most states. The argument presented here is that prostitution is a consensual agreement between adults of sexual services for money versus the missionary position that prostitution is a form of female enslavement. “Anything illegal is dangerous,” says Penn. Consider that what prostitutes do for money is illegal in most states while the same activity without monetary transaction is permitted between unmarried couples. So money makes it wrong? We are taken to the Wild Horse Resort in Nevada outside Las Vegas and introduced to the courtesans. No pimps, so no exploitation; where the sex workers get regular medical examinations and their services get purchased, not the human beings who voluntarily work there. Christianity, taking St Augustine’s point of view, has equated sex with sin – original sin, no less. For both the church and the state, criminalization of prostitution (as well as recreational drugs or abortions) is an effective means of social control. (This just in: Bush administration “AIDS czar” Randall Tobias, 64 and father of four, whose job it was to promote abstinence and discourage prostitution, resigned after being linked to Deborah Jeane Palfry, aka the “DC madam.” While he protested that all he got was a massage, she denied operating a brothel).

In the third episode the magicians look at the death penalty. According to surveys about 64% of Americans support capital punishment, believing that it has a deterrent effect, fits the crime, follows Biblical tradition, or has become painless. Mark Klaas, father of young Polly who was abducted from her bedroom and murdered in California, adamantly contends that killing the killer eliminates the problem. Extraordinary freedoms, he says, require extraordinary penalties. Rick Halperin and others disagree, calling the governmental approval of exterminating people barbaric and immoral, demeaning and costing society part of its humanity. Further, with as many cases of prison inmates as have been found through recent DNA testing to have been innocent of the crimes for which they’d been sentenced (some for over 20 years, others sent to death row), can the governments be trusted to be in charge of deciding when to take a person’s life? If an innocent person is executed, says one advocate for eliminating the death penalty, everyone who approved of capital punishment is guilty of murder.

What penalty should they be made to pay? From crucifixion to drawing and quartering to the guillotine to hanging to the firing squad to the gas chamber to electrocution to lethal injection: from punishment intended to cause agony to a method of death with as little pain as possible, there are proponents who want revenge as well as those who want “closure” favoring capital punishment. Statistics indicate that murder rates are often higher in states that use the death penalty (Texas has the highest number of executions and a murder rate above the national average) than in those that don’t allow it. Finally there’s the racial aspect that 42% of those on death row are African Americans, who make up less than 15% of the population, compared with 46% Caucasians. (Penn and Teller don’t mention that in 2006 only 25 countries continued the practice of executing felons, a reduction of fifteen nations over the past decade, or that the US is one of only five democracies still committed to capital punishment.) In the fourth program we’re introduced to crytozoology, which involves people who believe there are monsters running loose, or as Penn says, “Shit we made up.” Those who pursue mythical beasts such as Sasquatch or Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are featured and made fun of. However, a recent interview with serious scientists on NPR suggested that Sasquatch may actually exist. Maybe they’re just bullshitting us too. 

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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