What Is The Opposite Of R.I.P.?

James Dobson, who brought down Sassy magazine, is dead.

Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, along with pal Reverend Donald Wildmon, followed along like dumb evil lemmings, but it was James Dobson and his group Focus on the Family and a “sister” group called Women Aglow back in 1988 that spearheaded —and then relentlessly pummeled— a boycott of Sassy magazine and its advertisers.

He had a newsletter, back when that was an actual printed paper thing that got mailed out to his large following. His groups had already been successful in getting a couple of TV shows canceled using this method of targeting advertisers, so were riding high. The newsletter first instructed the readers to write postcards to our top advertisers saying they would not buy their products if they continued to advertise in Sassy magazine. (It was clear from these that they were writing from a script and had not actually seen the magazine itself.)

Then after some advertisers (Maybelline) defected, they reported on their success with that campaign in their next newsletter, providing an additional list of advertisers who had not been targeted previously, and kept this campaign going for months. Simultaneously, these Women Aglow went into their local newsstands and said that they would no longer shop there if the stores continued to carry Sassy.

We lost our 15 biggest advertisers all at once, and were delisted from 70% of our newsstands. It was our mentions of birth control, starting in our first issue, but then the feature story on gay teenagers in issue number three that seemed to be what really riled them up.

Sassy was able to recover slightly, especially thanks to some cool advertisers, like Guess and Doc Martens, who came out to support us with even more advertising pages. And we made some headway back onto newsstands after a fun-filled nationwide trip to visit the local distributors that had stopped carrying Sassy and convince them, sometimes successfully, to give us another chance and put it back on shelves. We also stopped writing about sex for at least two years. But so much damage was done that we were scraping by ever after that and never made it work again financially, after an unusually successful beginning. (We were the fastest growing magazine in terms of circulation since Sports Illustrated 20 years before!)

The killing off of Sassy is just one of so many examples of the egregious damage this one person caused. So that's why I wanted to ask you for phrases to say at the news of his death today. What IS the opposite of R.I.P.? Or let's talk about Sassy here and the good that it did do in spite of that dude.

Thank you all for sticking around and fighting the good fight together all these many years. Let's remember that today and let’s don't stop now.