Big Love, from the Set
It's getting tougher to laugh off the "slippery slope" argument - the claim that gay marriage will lead to polygamy, polyamory, and ultimately to the replacement of marriage itself by an infinitely flexible partnership system. We've now got a movement for legalized polyamory and the abolition of marriage in Sweden. (See "Fanatical Swedish Feminists.") The Netherlands has given legal, political, and public approval to a cohabitation contract for a polyamorous bisexual triad. (See "Here Come the Brides.") Two out of four reports on polygamy commissioned by the Canadian government recommended decriminalization and regulation of the practice. (See "Dissolving Marriage.") And now comes Big Love, HBO's domestic drama about an American polygamous family.
It has been argued that Big Love is just a harmless drama, no more likely to promote social acceptance of polygamy than the Sopranos is likely to promote crime.But we know that Big Love's own creators and stars don't see it this way. They clearly intend their show to challenge and change America's way of thinking about the family...
But is it fair to treat a television show or a movie as something that can change public opinion, and through public opinion our laws? I think it is. Certainly such claims are not new. The Dutch gay community's official history of the same-sex marriage movement notes how important a turning point it was when a gay couple appeared on a popular Dutch honeymoon show. That appearance helped pave the way for legal gay marriage in The Netherlands. So why shouldn't we take Big Love as a significant breakthrough for polygamy?
We don't need to talk about all the claims for the cultural significance of Will and Grace or Brokeback Mountain. Have a look at this fascinating piece from the Salt Lake City Tribune, " Will the polygamy debate ever be the same? " The Tribune draws an analogy between Big Love and the first appearance by a black in a television commercial. That appearance was arranged by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, through his then intern, Ed Frimage. Now a law-professor emeritus at University of Utah's law school, Frimage has long advocated the decriminalization and regulation of polygamy. Once you get an black on television to sell refrigerators, argues Frimage, "the game is over." The Salt Lake Tribune wonders out loud whether, after Big Love, the same might now be true for polygamists. As the Tribune reports, there are already legal challenges to anti-polygamy laws based on the Supreme Court's Lawrence v. Texas decision. It's likely we'll see more in the future. It's hard to believe that changing public attitudes in the wake of Big Love won't have an influence on those battles in years to come.
Stanley Kurtz
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/kurtz/kurtz200603130805.asp
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Chilling Protocol
When little Chanou was born in 2000 with a rare and painful illness that leads to abnormal bone development, doctors gave the Dutch infant less than three years to live. As it turns out, she only had seven months.
That's when her parents and physicians, discouraged by her grim prognosis, joined forces to do something that has become increasingly accepted in the Netherlands: They euthanized her.
"It is in some ways beautiful," Dutch pediatrician Eduard Verhagen told the London Times, when describing the dying moments of children like Chanou. "But it is also extremely emotional and very difficult."
Not as difficult as it should be. In the Netherlands, euthanasia of teenagers and adults is legal and baby euthanasia - already practiced among Dutch doctors - will soon be sanctioned by the government. According to the Times, a committee established at the urging of the Dutch Royal Medical Association will begin regulating baby euthanasia in a few weeks. Its standard for deciding who lives and dies will be Verhagen's own invention, the Groningen Protocol.
The Groningen Protocol is chilling, not only because of its audacity in attempting to judge the worth of human lives but because of its subjectivity in making those judgments. The protocol says that a newborn can be euthanized if his diagnosis and prognosis are "certain," his suffering is "hopeless and unbearable," and his quality of life is "very poor," according to the child's parents and "at least one independent doctor."
That standard assumes that physicians are infallible, our current medical knowledge is complete, and human beings are omniscient. How else could one assess with certainty another's prognosis, experience of suffering, and quality of life? We can know a child suffers; we can know a disease has no known cure. But we cannot pronounce with certainty that another person has no hope or that his suffering has rendered his life worthless
Colleen Carroll Campbell
National Review
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/campbell200603130818.asp
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Here's a speech we would like to hear from an Academy Award winner:
I thank you for this wonderful award. Receiving an Academy Award gives the recipient an almost unique opportunity to speak to hundreds of millions people around the world, so I would like take this once-in-a-lifetime moment to say this:
First, I want to thank my country, the United States of America. Every one of us here has this country to thank for enabling us to live lives of unprecedented freedom and unimaginable affluence. Too many of us forget that no other country in history has offered such opportunities to people in our profession or in any other profession, for that matter.
Second, I want to thank the men and women of the armed forces of the United States. While we bask in freedom and spend a good part of our lives going from party to party and award show to award show, tens of thousands of my fellow Americans are confronting a menace to our world as great as that fought by previous generations fighting Nazism and communism.
At the same time, I also want to apologize to these troops for my profession not having made even one motion picture about any of the heroic American fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq. This country is fighting a war, Hollywood. You may think this war is unwise, waged under mistaken, or even false, pretenses. And as an actor in Hollywood, you are overwhelmingly likely to hate this commander in chief. But even the men and women of Hollywood must recognize that America is fighting the worst people of our time, people who hurt every group Hollywood claims to care about -- minorities, women, gays -- people who engage in the sins Hollywood most professes to oppose -- intolerance and violence -- far more than anyone else on the planet.
In another era, when what many have labeled "the greatest generation" fought the German Nazis and the Japanese fascists, Hollywood made movie after movie depicting that great war and our great warriors. And Hollywood showed freedom's enemies as the cruel and vicious people they were. We have not produced one film yet depicting this war in positive terms or one depicting this generation's enemies of freedom as the cruel and vicious people they are.
In fact, the only nominated film about people who slaughter children at discos, blow up weddings, and bomb pizzerias and buses filled with men, women and children is one that attempts to show these murderers in God's name as complex human beings. Just imagine how the Academy would have reacted 60 years ago to a film depicting Nazi murderers as complex human beings. We have descended far.
Dennis Prager
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2006/03/07/188864.html
