The "Traditional" Family

First of all, I would like to give you all a "Happy MLK Day" today.

Now that that's done, let's talk about a subject near and dear to my heart: Fundamenalist Christians (or, substitute the fundamentalist group of your choice).

Tody I - or rather LP - bought the third season of a particular Showtime program. Aw, hell, it's Penn & Teller's B.S. (Bullshit, for the layperson).

The second episode on the first disc was about "Traditional Family Values," which I have always felt was a little out of whack.

A) Because I gew up in a single-parent home and think that not having a father in my home did not affect my upbringing. In fact, I think that having my mother and grandmother was the best thing that could have happened to me.

B) The people who always say that a traditional family is a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, and a fuzzy dog are generally hypocrites or messed-up in a fundamental way anyway (no pun intended).

C) Since I didn't grow up a religious sheep, I can see that most people only believe that because they were inundated with religious nonsense growing up anyway and couldn't make an independent decision if all their eternity depended on it.

So, now that I've got the chip on my shoulder off, let's talk about the "traditional" family for a little while. Now, again, I will try to minimize the number of "quotation marks" I use.

But I can't promise anything.

Historically, the traditional family (See! No quotation marks) consisted of a man and many women, not a Christian daddy and a WASPY mother. Are we clear on that? There is no evidence to support that it has always been a single man and a woman.

We're (almost) all educated here, so I won't bother with walking you through all of this, but the gist of everything is that there is no single objective way to determine what works as a family and what doesn't.

Did you know:

- Same-sex parents tend to be more well-educated, of higher income brackets, are not authoritarian, and - guess what, people - are guaranteed never to have accidental children. I don't know of many other families that can say that.

But, I suppose most of you already know that, right? The one thing that I did learn from the show tonight is that there is one distinct drawback to the "two mommies" or "two daddies" angle of parenting: homophobia.

Yep, that's right: children of gay parents tend to develop homophobia from the people surrounding them. So, then, it's not the parents' fault. Wow, homophobes, how do ya feel?

Also, where did the idea that children of gay parents tend to do drugs and commit violent crime? Anyone who's ever taken a sociology class - or just plain lived in a city - knows that crime tends to develop out of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, or something I like to call "Fraternity."

Yeah, a lot of the crime can be traced to douchie kids who have no sense of moral obligation. What about the stellar family there? I know some fraternity kids who have done, said, or have been purported to have done some pretty nasty things. I hate to pick on them - I really don't - but I think it makes a good argument. Rich kids can be criminals, too. And they're well-educated and from "Mommy and Daddy" homes.

Now, that seems to negate my argument, right? WRONG. It only proves it. It proves that there are NO rules to family. Either it works or it doesn't. In some cases it does, but in a vast majority - check the 50% of marriages that end every year - it doesn't.

Read your history books, people. And, to quote the inimitable Fred Durst, Take a Look Around.