by Quentin Cockburn

My children enjoy watching ‘Modern Family’.

The Brady Bunch

It’s a sort of mockumentary, reality sit com, akin to the ‘Brady Bunch’ with a more contemporary feel.  The stars are portrayed within family groups that are cross cultural, openly gay and “out there”.  It’s only the straight family who encounter generational tensions, and inevitable compromises through being ‘normal’.

It is light, humourous, well scripted and contemporary.  The only thing missing?  The poor modern family.  Poverty in the television modern era is akin to sexuality in the sixties. Verboten!!

You remember the Brady Bunch?  A saccharine sweet interpretation of the immediate post nuclear family.  Two groups of kids coming together to form a wholesome family unit.  The parents Mike and Carol, getting it on, to raise the kiddies, in a classic split level seventies house.  They had it all, it was wholesome, and of its time.  Only years later we discovered that Mike was a real homosexual, Alice was a lesbian, and all the kiddies ended up in way or another experimenting in sexuality, drugs, alcoholism and each other!  You see what went on in the sixties and seventies was also about keeping secrets to themselves.  Within the family.  Now the secrets are out of the closet.  For some amongst us, that’s a breach of faith.  You’ve got to keep a secret, and when it’s out it constitutes a breach of trust.  It’s that simple.

But now everyone on telly is going the same, and they’re not trying to hide their sexuality, their differences, and individuality.  It’s akin to all those single father sit coms and dramas from the sixties, where the missus and the concept of sexuality were airbrushed out.  ‘My Three Sons’, ‘A Family Affair’, ‘Leave it to Beaver’, ‘My Favourite Martian’, ‘Mr Ed’,  and in the Australian context Matt Hammond and the Skippy family. These days, Skippy ‘d be gay and Clancy, the eternal innocent would be an LBGT exotic dancer.

Now its come to the attention of the Royal Commission that some families were way ahead of their time.  The Catholic Church for example is a broad family.  From this wellspring of family virtue, almost the entire front bench of our current parliament derives its moral certainty.

It seems for decades Catholic Priests have been insisting that little kiddies, whether they be in Orphanages, ordinary families, or just children of the flock should be buggerred, bastardized and abused as part of their education.  One bloke,

father rissole and Cannonball Fred

Father Risdale, was so good at it, he was sent all around the country to ensure that every little innocent was taught the fundamentals of original sin.  Of course, though Cardinal Pell shared digs with Risdale and other notorious predatory sicko paedophiles, he never ever knew what was going on.  Can’t blame him.  At Nuremberg way back in ‘46 no one at Dachau, Auschwitz or Treblinka ever had any idea what was going on either, ‘befehl ist befehl’, ‘orders are orders’, and aint the priests all just orders??

Well recently the Irish, who haven’t had the benefit of a Royal Commission, have voted 63% in favour of same sex marriage. It seems the Catholic Church in spite of its best ministrations have not been able to sway public opinion against this corruption of family values. That, and the economic meltdown have given the Irish something to think about. They’ve rejected ‘old style family values’ and the likes of ‘dear old’ father Risdale.  Now there’s talk of doing the same here. Not on your nelly!!!  The front bench would not have it. Labor has proposed a private members bill designed to fail. The P.M wont have a bar of it!!  He says it’ll (same sex marriage) resolve itself as an issue in cabinet, one way or other ‘in the usual way’.  Good on him, that’s what he’s learnt from the church, to do things in ‘the usual way’.

I spose that’s reinterpreting modern family as post modern?