Many years ago, then-Vice President Dan Quayle criticized a popular network sitcom because of the values it portrayed. Quayle said that “Murphy Brown,” starring Candace Bergen, promoted moral laxity. His comments were met with a firestorm of ridicule: didn’t Quayle realize that the characters were fictitious, and that no one takes sitcoms seriously, anyway?
How things change. A couple of decades later, social commentators are pointing to sitcoms as proof of America’s growing acceptance of the gay lifestyle. An upcoming NBC sitcom featuring a gay couple and their surrogate child is called — wait for it — “The New Normal.” While conservative groups loudly protested the “Ellen” sitcom in which comedian Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian in 1997, gay characters now are common fare. Vice President Biden recently chimed in, opining that “Will & Grace,” which ran from 1998 through 2006, “probably did more to educate the American public than anything anybody’s ever done so far” regarding sexual diversity.
Media is a powerful carrier of values, lifestyles, and mores. Global media contributes to “Monoculture”, the Global Current which carries messages of all stripes, disseminating and entrenching ideas at speeds and distances previously unimaginable. And, because “culture is upstream of politics,” laws are also changing. With President Obama’s recent announcement of support for gay marriage, he proved that a long-ago Republican Vice President was right.
Leave a Reply