Giving the game away

The new Christian RW "blockbuster" film on the horizon is "Persecuted", and should prove just as successful as "Jesus Christ, Superstar" "Left Behind" and "The Passion of the Christ":  Bad direction, worse scripting, and horrible [over]acting make them even intolerable as fiction, but that's not what they are trying to be, you know <*wink-wink...*>

The premise of "Persecuted" is that the federal government is trying to push a "Faith and Fairness Act":

The film opens with Luther (James Remar, who played the father of a serial killer on the Showtime drama Dexter) refusing a last-ditch effort of Senate Majority Leader Donald Harrison (Bruce Davison, best known for his role as Sen. Robert Kelly in the X-Men movies) to convince him to endorse the Faith and Fairness Act, a bill that would give “equal time” to all religions. “I cannot water down the gospel to advance anyone’s political agenda,” Luther tells Harrison in one of many robotic pronouncements. 

Furious, the senator dispatches what later is revealed to be a Secret Service agent to drug Luther and frame him for the rape and murder of a 16 year-old girl. Emerging from his stupor the next morning on a rural roadside, Luther discovers a massive manhunt for him is underway. He spends the remainder of the film attempting to prove his innocence and evading the government’s efforts to assassinate him.

There's a booming market for Haldol in certain demographics that some entrepreneur ought to examine….

But back to the substance of this paranoia:

This is an allusion to that horrible "Fairness Doctrine" that so hobbled broadcast media decades ago, which Reagan scuppered in 1987 (which conservatives are still having nightmares about).  Talk about "persecution":  Having to hear a contrary voice (or worse yet, a debate) every once in a while.

This conservative tiny bugaboo has morphed into a new one where <*horrors!*> every religion will be required to be presented equally (by whom, I don't really know).  Talk about crippling broadcast or government:  Spend every day presenting all thousand or so religions?  You wouldn't even have time for sex in such a dystopia and think of the consequences.  Na ga happen.

That being said, what exactly is wrong with such an "equal time" provision?  Isn't government supposed to be neutral between religions?  And why would the Christians complain? unless …  ummm, ummmm, oh, yeah … maybe they're already getting the lion's share of coverage right now.  Isn't that a problem under the First Amendment?

[update]:

Here's some further jaw-dropping stuff (from the Politico article):

One of the film’s many duff notes involves Fred Thompson, the former senator and presidential candidate, who plays Dr. Charles Luther, John Luther’s father, a Catholic priest. Thompson’s grimly earnest Luther advises his son that he’s “just a pawn in a bigger game” and that he must “stand up against a cabal of phony politicians” who “can’t silence the truth.” How the protagonist, named for the founder of the Protestant Reformation, is the son of a Catholic priest, is never explained in the film.

Not to mention, as Kristen points out, your standard Catholic priest is not supposed to have a lot of sons.  I can just see the cash registers clinking away….