The list of celebrity Scientologists is known and long. Tom Cruise, Issac Hayes, John Travolta. Bart Simpson?
Nancy Cartwright is the voice of Bart Simpson, that lovable scamp at the heart of one of the biggest shows on our network, The Simpsons. Apparently, she is also a Scientologist. She recently used her voice, as well as the popular characters, on a robocall to promote her being featured in a conference for Scientology. While it is clearly within her right to use her own voice, the use of the voice and name of Bart Simpson is much trickier territory. Rather than making a judgement of our own, we turned to Facebook and the TVLoop community’s Addicted to The Simpsons application to get fan reaction.
With ~2500 votes, The Simpsons fans have responded…and they are not happy. While 7% thought the move was OK, and 18% thought that it was up to Cartwright, over two-thirds of the fans (67%) voted with “Hell no, she shouldn’t have done it.”
The overwhelmingly negative reaction to this move is not confined to our users alone. Danny Gallagher at TV Squad had a similar reaction, when he says about Scientologists, “they have either grown too powerful or have completely lost whatever grip they had left on reality, which wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to begin with.”
While most of the users who left comments on the poll were somewhere between angry and disappointed with Cartwright, a few had a more moderate view. One user mused, “I think it’s reasonable in the sense that I’m not bothered by members of the Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist and generally all faiths being allowed to promote their faiths. To discriminate against any one faith is unjust, whether or not you agree with what’s being said she is still entitled to say it so long as she has the legal right to.”
One lesson to take away from all of this is a reinforcement of the old adage, “no news is bad news.” Before this particular poll, our largest in the community only garnered 244 votes. It just goes to show, sometimes, even when you ask them not to, people will have a cow.
lawls!