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Chuck Lorre’s Hollywood Hypocrisy On Marriage And The Pill

A show about a divorced mom who is also the mom of a teen mom and the daughter of a single mom isn’t a good way to attack the benefits marriage.

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Chuck Lorre is a wildly successful Hollywood creator and producer of television sitcoms. Some of them are great or good — Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, The Big Bang Theory — and some are execrable but inexplicably popular — Two and a Half Men. Seriously, it’s vile and unfunny. What is wrong with you, America?

His latest venture is Mom, which just started this past fall and is wrapping up its first season this month.

Here’s the synopsis of that sitcom:

Mom follows Christy Plunkett (Anna Faris), a single mother who—after dealing with her battle with alcoholism and drug addiction—decides to restart her life in Napa, California’s wine country working as a waitress and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Her mother Bonnie Plunkett (Allison Janney) is also a recovering drug and alcohol addict, and her 17-year-old daughter Violet (Sadie Calvano), who was born when Christy was 16, has become pregnant by her boyfriend Luke. Christy also has a younger son Roscoe by her ex-husband Baxter, a deadbeat drug-dealer.

So the show is about a bunch of women dealing with the fall-out of breakdown of the nuclear family. Not a bad idea for a show and one that can be mined for laughs, even if we all know the dire statistics about how real-world family breakdown is a recipe for poverty, low educational attainment, mental health woes and a host of other problems. But I’m sure the beautiful Allison Janney and Anna Faris help mask what single parenting is like in the real world for non-elite white women. And that’s what we want from our TV shows, I guess.

Anyway, Lorre is known for his vanity cards, where he shares brief personal, philosophical or political thoughts. He had one such vanity card at the end of the latest episode of Mom.

lorre

Here’s what it said if you have trouble reading that:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #450 I believe that the much argued “sanctity of marriage” ended in 1960 when the FDA approved the birth control pill for contraception. In other words, the minute science allowed women to take charge of their reproductive cycle, the cultural reason for protecting marriage — ensuring the continuation of the species — collapsed. Additionally, when conception became a fundamental female choice, as opposed to a random event, thousands of years of patriarchal rule came to an end. That is why male-dominated religions and social institutions are so filled with rage right now. They know, at least subconsciously, that the jig is up. Their tribal blooddrenched reign is over. We are witnessing the death throes of the testosterone epoch. Unfortunately, organizations and philosophies that took thousands of years to develop might take just as long to die. Regardless, the hand-writing, probably a pretty cursive, is on the wall. Do what you will with this information, but I’m making a donation to NOW.

Are you kidding me?

Did I mention this appeared after a show about a single, divorced mother who is the mother of a teen mom who is also unmarried? And that the main character is herself  the child of a single mother? And that each and every character got pregnant after 1960, after supposedly the cultural reason for protecting marriage “collapsed”? And should we note that the end of this supposed patriarchal rule looks a lot like, oh I don’t know, the complete and utter breakdown of family health and happiness and the right of children to be raised by their mother and father? That it looks like maybe Christianity et al. and various natural social institutions were actually not male-dominated at all but just really good ways for taking care of vulnerable women, men and the children that are the natural result of their sexual relations?

And should we note anything about the 57 million abortions ever since “conception became a fundamental female choice” where women took “charge of their reproductive cycle” and we killed off “social institutions” that took “thousands of years to develop”? Do 57 million unborn children — whose lives were ended by “choice” — constitute a “tribal blooddrenched reign”?

Was Lorre self-aware enough to get the incongruity, incoherency or plain insanity of his vanity card after this sitcom show? Is anyone thinking things through any more or are we just supposed to repeat the same tired slogans of the 1960s and pretend like the reality of the last 40 years didn’t happen?

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