The founder of a club against swearing is asking ABC to not air an upcoming episode of Modern Family that shows a 2-year-old presumably saying the F-word.
McKay Hatch, 18, who founded the No Cussing Club four years ago, said that he’s trying to “stop this from happening,” or at the very least, let ABC know “that people all over the world don’t want to have a 2-year-old saying the ‘F-bomb’ on TV.”
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, the episode, titled “Little Bo Bleep” and scheduled to air Wednesday night, features Lily, daughter of gay couple Cam and Mitchell, who has added the unfortunate word to her vocabulary and her dads are worried she might let loose with it while participating as a flower girl in an upcoming wedding.
Show creator Steve Levitan told EW that he “had to really convince” the network to sign off on the episode.
“We thought it was a very natural story since, as parents, we’ve all been through this… We are not a sexually charged show… [But] I’m sure we’ll have some detractors.”
At the top of that detractors list is Hatch, who says that media has to be “accountable for their choices” just like children.
The actress that plays Lily, Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, didn’t actually have to say the F-word herself, according to the Associated Press. Instead, she said “fudge” and the word will be partially bleeped and her mouth pixelated, so that there’s only an implication she actually “dropped the F-bomb.”
Hatch and his website were victims of the hacking group Anonymous in 2009, which claimed that Hatch’s parents were exploiting him and using their son “at great personal gain” in a message they had put up on the website in place of the regular content. It also launched a continual Distributed Denial-of-service attack against the website, causing outages. Hatch also claimed to ABC at the time that he was receiving “hate mail” from the group, in the form of nearly 50,000 emails a day.