by Corky von Texasheim

Created on: June 20, 2008

I was just having tea and cucumber sandwiches with my neighbor, June Cleaver, discussing this very subject ever so politely. We were soon joined by Santa Claus and Chewbacca, both being just as verbose as my dear friend June.

June was about to put down her autographed copy of Emily Post's Book of Modern Manners when she realized Wally had been locked in the bathroom for well over half an hour with a copy of National Geographic... but I digress.

What June, Santa Claus, and Chewbacca all have in common is that they're all as fictional as the very idea of the "traditional family," replete with 1.5 children and a Golden Retriever lovingly named "Mr. Fancy Pants." The reason families like the Cleavers were so popular in the golden age of television, which this concept of family directly refers to, is that it was an escapist family, where nobody had to discuss nasty issues that were going on in contemporaneously, such as the fact that Jim Crow laws were alive and well.

The "traditional family" well guarded by a white picket fence (with Brinks Home Security commercials being the modern day incarnation of this fence) is part of the set of myths which govern so much of our way of thinking. And so much of our thinking IS heavily influenced by television.

"It was a simpler time" is uttered when some of us wax poetic about "the good old days." That "simpler time" never really existed except for in the minds of television writers.

Yes, there indeed was less divorce back in "the good old days," but there was also a great deal of spousal rape and physical abuse, "miscegenation" laws were on the books (sadly, most states up until the late 60s), and nobody talked about "the terrible thing" that happened just a few years before in Germany, Austria, and Poland to "those people" whom we never saw on our little black and white Philco television sets either.

One of the things greatly blamed for "ruining" the "traditional family" is the sexual revolution, including the wide acceptance of pornography. Before you blame Hugh Hefner, Gloria Steinem, or Erica Jong, consider the following: Not only was there great sexual repression before the sexual revolution, but hardly many people knew the names of their body parts, and since anything regarding sex wasn't talked about "in good company," things like the sexual abuse of children was widely ignored as a real social problem until that time.

The "sujet du jour" right now is gay marriage, and how that has "ruined" the "traditional family." Rosie O'Donnell is not responsible for the downfall of humanity, I hate to tell y'all. First of all, there are hundreds of years of evidence that male-female exclusive marriage is actually a pretty new phenomena in human history, with the Catholic Church performing male-male marriages early on in its history. Secondly, sorry to break it to all the homophobes out there, but homosexuality wasn't exactly invented recently: there have ALWAYS been gays and lesbians getting married, but it wasn't something talked about by June Cleaver and her buddies in the sewing circle.

What's happened to the traditional concept of family? Absolutely nothing. The general public is just now maturing and becoming aware that it is, in fact, a myth.

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