The following is an email from Jim Nimmo
(Posted 4-7-02)

Is OETA afraid of Robert Redford and the Sundance Film Festival?

The OCU Center for Interpersonal Studies has announced its 3-part documentary series for Spring, 2002. Of special interest is the showing of Scout's Honor on April 28, at 2 p.m. in the Jones Auditorium-Noble Center, the large building at the corner of NW 23 and Blackwelder on the OCU campus. Admission is free and following the screening there will be ample opportunity for discussion moderated by Dr. Harbor Winn, director of the Center for Interpersonal Studies.

Scout's Honor was broadcast on the PBS network during 2001, yet Oklahoma's own OETA chose NOT to broadcast the 1-hour program, calling it too controversial. OETA chose not to respond to inquires as to why evolution programs which conflict with some people's religious teaching, and nature programs showing animals in the throes of carnal reproduction are not considered "too controversial", yet a film honored with a Sundance Film Festival Best Documentary award is shunned by what I consider the fundamentalist viewpoints of the programming policy of OETA. The funding of the Boy Scouts of America continues to be a prominent news item--is it legal to fund a private, discriminatory organization with public money and services--yet OETA refuses to air a program which discusses this issue.

Is OETA afraid of the film's association with Robert Redford and Sundance or is it the homophobia with which OETA is rife and the fear of free inquiry which will show OETA for what it is--a paternalistic state service of religiously inhibited bigots interested in using tax-payer money to promote their own narrow view of life and its possibilities?

For further information you can contact Dr. Harbor Winn at 405-521-5472, fax 521-5447, e-mail hwinn@okcu.edu