Tonight I happened to catch political comic duo Penn & Teller’s latest episode, “Family Values,” in a TV series with a name that can’t be printed on a family web site. (Episode profile and airtimes.)
The series airs on Showtime. This episode’s synopsis:
Examining the hysteria whipped up by the media and politicians to ‘save’ the traditional family structure, a desperate effort to perpetuate a fraudulent concept of mother, father, two kids, a dog and a picket fence.
Penn & Teller does not pretend to be unbiased. They do, however, allow multiple sides of an issue to air their views.
Exgay therapist Richard Cohen gets ample time to air his redefinition of the “traditional family” in the mold of 1950s TV shows, his sexualization of platonic “man love,” and his campaign to make men more macho. P&T react to Cohen with a mix of blunt factoids about Cohen (recited before by XGW) — and with the sexual putdowns that one expects of an after-hours program on Showtime.
The show is most effective when it portrays lesbian parents raising children with values that are just as ordinary and traditional as those of the religious right. The show also dissects the religious-right “traditional family” mantra with a family profile of a polyamorous heterosexual quartet and their children, and interviews with experts who either summarize the history of diverse family living arrangements or cite longitudinal studies on the health of children raised in nontraditional environments.
I come away from shows like this wondering why people like Cohen cooperate in their production. P&T, in particular, are well-known for their irreverent and profane political comedy.
Did Cohen’s desire for attention exceed the shame that he knew would result?
Or was Cohen looking for an opportunity to be insulted by liberal comedians so that the event could be turned into an indignant PFOX press release, WND story, and fund-raising appeal?
I saw Penn & Teller’s show too. I was hoping for some examples of challenges to Cohen’s claims… but basically they just said it was bull***t (the name of the show and their standard phrase). They took an approach of “why should you care what I do” rather than their usual “these guys are frauds” approach.
Although it’s not the approach I prefer, it probably appeals to their audience. And Cohen did come off pretty strange, babbling about “healthy man-love”. So much so that Penn made a point of telling the audience that they didn’t try to deceive Cohen about the program and warned him of their bias and he STILL let them televise him looking like an idiot.
I didn’t see the show (we don’t subscribe to “premium” cable in the US of A), but one thing regarding the “therapist” Cohen that you might want to consider is that anyone with a couch can call himself a “therapist.”
Cohen is apparently a media whore. We know from the various operations such as Focus and so forth that there’s a lot of money to be made in the “ex-gay” racket. Cohen was probably on that show trying to advertise his ex-gay “therapist” operation.