Pop Culture and Polygamy

Timothy George and Charles Colson on the Big Love strategy :

Big Love , HBO’s series about the “polygamists next door” in Sandy, Utah, ended its five-year run last March, but polygamy is still going strong on American television. TLC’s reality series Sister Wives , which features a real-life polygamist family named the Browns, has just been renewed for a third season.

TLC used to be called “The Learning Channel,” which prompts the question: What are Americans learning from sympathetic portrayals of polygamy in popular culture?

When Will & Grace debuted in 1998, few could have imagined that scarcely a decade later, same-sex marriage would be regarded by many Americans as a constitutional right. Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York was no alarmist when he worried aloud that the next step in the marriage debate would be another redefinition to allow polygamy and infidelity. How did we get to this point?

It began with making what was once marginalized and tolerated seem normal and mainstream by calling into question the very idea of norms. Pop culture excels at perpetuating this kind of relativism: gay characters were depicted as interchangeable with, if not superior to, their heterosexual counterparts. The message was clear: Only a bigot would make a fuss over homosexual behavior.

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