Tuesday, February 2, 2010

And Society Reaches A New Low

The pace at which we accomplish this feat is clearly accelerating. Kathleen Parker at the Washington Post fills us in on this one:

At first glance, bump-the-show sounds like a reasonable response to "Bump," the show -- a new, faux-reality Web-based docudrama featuring actors trying to decide whether to have an abortion.

God help us.

Although the idea is to humanize the debate, none of the characters is especially sympathetic. Each of the three women ostensibly selected from a "pool" of 300 is pregnant under varying circumstances with which viewers are expected to relate. To be clear, no one is really pregnant. The actors are all young and white, despite the fact that blacks have abortions at five times the rate of whites. The doctor, however, is African American -- a man who combines the reassuring manner of Marcus Welby with the ethereal wisdom of Bagger Vance.

Oh, nobody is really pregnant? I guess that makes this ok, then. We're just going to PRETEND that a whole group of people will be deciding whether or not to kill babies. Thank goodness. For a second, I thought that we had crossed a line or something.

You might be wondering what sparked the creation of this show.

The idea for the "show," which launches Monday, was inspired, of all things, by Barack Obama's commencement address at Notre Dame University last year. When the president said he wanted "to find ways to communicate about a workable solution to the problem of unintended pregnancies," executive producer Dominic Iocco conceived "Bump."

There you have it. I'm sure that, by the time all the great fruits of the Obama speech are measured, we'll have so much dialogue that we won't have a pot to urinate in. Sure, a bunch of babies might die in the interim, but with all that common ground, dialogue, and secular common good we'll be spreading, it will all be worth it.

And people wonder why God would punish a nation.

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