How does Don Imus get a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, but Duane “Dog the Bounty Hunter” Chapman grovels [1] all the way across the entire talk show circuit and they still won’t put his show back on? Dog the Bounty Hunter may be the best reality show ever conceived, and it’s so full of profanity, redneck dysfunction and perversions of expectation—after all, the star of the show is a convicted murderer!—that it seems like The Dog would be able to handle a little bad publicity about using the n-word. If you’ve watched the show at all, then you would absolutely expect him to use the n-word. We certainly know that he says “mother f-----“ so much, usually when he’s slamming a fugitive up against a wall, that often the whole takedown scene is one continuous bleep sound, with Dog’s entire nuclear family contributing profanity and/or obscene descriptions of the perp. (In one episode Dog’s zaftig wife Beth got into a catfight with the girlfriend of a perp, and beyond the “fat cow” and “whore” epithets that were flung, she had be bleeped more extensively than the menfolk. Dog’s preference in such cases is to pull his mace-toting male troops into line and stay at a safe distance, encouraging the men on the other side to do the same and leave the ladies alone until they’ve settled it.)

At any rate, how can the A&E Network invest all that money and promotion in a show about a back-country anti-hero—the fact that the show is set in Hawaii even has a “Beverly Hillbillies” feel to it, with the unvarnished Texans reinventing themselves in paradise—then pull the plug when he acts like a back-country anti-hero in his private life? In fact, it’s even better than that. His own son taped Dog saying the n-word, then sold the tape for $15,000 to buy drugs. I don’t recall which son it was—Dog has fathered so many children, both in and out of wedlock, that they’re constantly showing up, wandering through episodes, then disappearing again—but, however it happened, they should have just morphed it into an episode of the show! Many of us are still reeling from last season, when Dog and Beth got married in the cheesy fake lagoon of a Hawaii hotel. Until that point, everyone assumed that they already were married, especially since Christianity and “family values” are such a big part of the show, but apparently Dog had just forgotten to get the license all these years.

So what have we got here? We’ve got a highly tattooed potty-mouth family led by an old-fashioned patriarch who himself looks like a fugitive from an eighties hair band who recently lost a bar fight: deeply furrowed forehead, baggy eyes, greying lion’s mane, skin-tight spaghetti-strap T-shirt, silver capped boots, bicycle gloves and arm bands stretched over biceps that look like they’ve been cooked on a barbecue grill. The back story is that Dog served hard time in a Texas prison for murder, has captured 6,000 fugitives, is currently under indictment in Mexico for kidnapping, and has made a deal with God: he’ll catch bad guys to atone for being a bad guy. Or at least he will after he gets rid of those Mexican charges [2], which, by the way, are the direct result of Dog tracking down and nailing serial rapist Andrew Luster, the Max Factor heir who turned out to be one of the most frightening psychopaths of this young century. (One of Dog’s other famous collars is William Scatarie, the white supremacist who murdered Denver shock jock Alan Berg. Couldn’t we trade one n-word conversation for removing a truly violent racist from circulation?) Less well known is the fact that Dog’s mother was a Pentecostal preacher who evangelized a lot with “the darker people”—which, in rural Colorado, meant Native Americans.

But here’s why Dog’s message matters. His eponymous program was simultaneously the most conservative law-and-order show this side of Cops, the most liberal social-action show this side of a PBS documentary (“I am what rehabilitation stands for,” says The Dog), and a constant fount of entertaining Christian witness, beginning with the bounty hunter prayer circle, in which he prays for the safety of his bounty-hunting family, then asks God to protect various characters with names like “The Animal” who are about to be caught in the pincers of a Da Kine manhunt. (Da Kine is his bail bond company in Hawaii.)

But the climax of every episode, and the emotional high point of the show, is the long ride to prison in Dog’s van. The handcuffed perp usually sits in the middle back seat next to Dog, who offers him a cigarette and then says something like “How long you gonna let the crack control ya, man?” And that unleashes some amazing moments, including, in one case, a steely career criminal who had done 20 years of hard prison time and refused to talk until Dog said, “You’ve got a six-year-old daughter, you need to think about her.”

“I love my daughter!” the man spit back at the Dog.

“Yes, but you never gave her the chance to love you!”

And, with that, tears literally popped out of the guilty man’s eyes, and his whole body went limp. By the time they got to jail, Dog was plotting to intervene with the judge.

Come on, people, somebody intervene with the judge in Dog’s case. Is Duane Chapman a huge self-promoter? Of course he is. So were David and Solomon. Does Dog strain the limits of credulity when he goes on Hannity and Colmes and says that he wants to be buried on the unmarked hill at Mount Vernon with George Washington’s 300 slaves? (“Children will come to there,” he told Hannity, “saying ‘Why is Dog buried there? Why is that white man laid there?’ And they will be able to say ‘Because that white man made a terrible mistake and he requested that.’ That is where I deserve to be, a grave without marker if they are going to be that, too.” Dog never explained, if the grave was unmarked and the hill was unmarked, how the children would know he’s there.) Of course he does! It’s Dog’s job to be over the top. He doesn’t know how to do it any other way.

But that was back in November, before the groundswell of popular support—from ministers, from prisoners, from dysfunctional families, from guys who had been arrested by Dog—reached critical mass. And Dog did the right thing. He didn’t say “Put me back on TV because I’m popular.” He said “I’m going to go to every brother who felt hurt by what I said.”. By early January he was meeting in New York with Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality. Earlier this week he was on the dais with senator and presidential candidate John McCain for the Martin Luther King celebration at the New York Sheraton. Innis, who had been one of the first to call on A&E to get rid of him, now says he considers Dog a personal friend and was apparently blown away when all the black employees of CORE lined up to have their pictures taken with him. That’s because black people know the difference between a redneck who uses the n-word and a real racist. Now we’ve got to educate the suits at A&E.

Sign the petition [3] to free The Dog.