Amish Heat

[DTMX]

Amish Heat brings you only the HOTTEST Amish on the Web!

[Jim Alfredson]

Scandalous!!!!!

[Jazzmoose]

Oh, my goodness; this really is going too far!

[7/4]

Moo!

WTF..... I get back from dinner and it's Amish-a-mania.

[7/4]

ABC:

Last Update: Friday, March 5, 2004. 4:01pm (AEDT)

Amish reality show canned after protests

American television viewers are unlikely to see a reality show about Amish youth facing the modern world following protests by members of the United States Congress.

The program, tentatively called Amish in the City, planned to show five young people from the religious group living with mainstream youth.

The Amish shun contact with the wider world, living in tight-knit communities with little modern technology.

But media company Viacom is reconsidering its decision after protests.

It has been accused of exploitation and bigotry.

The company was also responsible for a program last year called The Real Beverly Hillbillies, which was canned after similar protests.

[7/4]

The Guardian:

Amish reality show provokes outrage

John Plunkett

Friday March 5, 2004

In the race to invent the most outrageous reality show yet, the US has already given us Man Versus Beast, in which a Sumo wrestler did battle with an orangutan in a nappy, and dwarf dating show The Littlest Groom.

But American TV bosses may have gone a format too far with Amish in the City, a new reality show in which five teenage members of the reticent religious group swap their unmodernised way of life for the fast times and bright lights of city life.

The "life swap" show has not yet been aired, but is already under fire from rural groups claiming it will mock their way of life.

"This series is not a documentary on how Amish teenagers struggle with their cultural and religious identity - it's a deliberate attempt to exploit the beliefs and practices of the Amish," said US congressman Joe Pitts.

Amish in the City is in the advanced stages of production at US network CBS, which was also behind the controversial reality show, the Real Beverly Hillbillies, in which a poor family from the rural South was relocated to a Beverly Hills mansion.

The programme was dropped after real life "hillbillies" staged a nationwide protest against the show.

"We couldn't do the Beverly Hillbillies," the CBS chairman, Leslie Moonves, told TV reporters in January. But, he joked, the Amish "don't have quite as good a lobbying effort". However, opposition to the Amish programme has proved just as virulent.

"Once again Viacom has created a reality show where rural people were going to be these curios," said Dee Davis, president of the Centre for Rural Strategies in Kentucky. "Viacom's got plenty of ways to make money without ridiculing rural people."

In a letter to Viacom, senators Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum said they knew of "no other reality series that singles out the beliefs and practices of a specific group of people as a subject for humour".

They added: "For almost three centuries, the Amish lived the way they do out of Christian piety and conviction, not out of ignorance. If, by producing this show, you fail to respect that, you will be opening yourselves to charges of bigotry."

The Amish, whose way of life was brought to a worldwide audience in the 1985 film Witness, starring Harrison Ford, live in tight-knit communities and avoid contact with modern technology and the outside world. They are allowed to explore modern life for a brief period in a custom known as "rumspringa", under which they could take part in the show.

In a statement responding to criticisms of the show, CBS denied that the series sought to demean the Amish and said it would depict them with the "utmost respect and decency", according to the New York Times.

It said no date has been set for the series, which will air on CBS sister network UPN, and since it was "still in the early development stage, we sincerely hope that any judgement will be reserved until the show is produced".