The Turkish government is to ban several popular television dating shows which do not fit in with ‘traditions and customs’.
Matchmaking reality shows like Ne Çikarsa Bahtina (Luck of the Draw) are very popular in Turkey but there have been tens of thousands of complaints and the ruling AKP sees them as out of kilter with the Islamic values it has introduced after decades of secularism.
Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmuş said: ‘There are some strange programmes that would scrap the institution of family, take away its nobility and sanctity.’
In an interview with a provincial TV channel carried in the Hurriyet newspaper Kurtulmuş said: ‘We are working on this and we are coming to the end of it. God willing, in the near future, we will most likely remedy this with an emergency decree.
‘God willing, we will meet these societal demands.’
The founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, laid down the secular foundations of the state in 1923 but President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been sliding toward conservative Islam, according to critics.
Kurtulmus described the dating shows as counter to the ‘customs, traditions, beliefs, the Turkish family structure and the culture of Anatolian lands’.
He hit back at those who claimed they were ratings successes: ‘So what the ratings are very high and thus the advertising revenue is high? Let there not be that kind of advertising revenues.’
The deputy premier said he had been told there were 120,000 individual cases of complaints against the reality shows.
Earlier this week a man who murdered two previous wives appeared on Ne Çikarsa Bahtina seeking a new partner.
Hurriyet reported that Sefer Çalınak, 62, casually admitted killing but said he was ‘an honest person looking for a new wife’.
The Turkish religious affairs agency Diyanet criticised dating shows last month saying they ‘exploited family values and desecrated the family institution by stepping on it’.
The Turkish authorities insist there is full freedom of religious belief in the country’s diverse society but many secular liberals feel increasingly uncomfortable.
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