"Wife" Swap

OK, so where exactly are they finding these people?

Leave it to Hollywood to spoon feed us shards of glass in the name of entertainment. Good grief.

The show "Wife Swap" has taken a walk off the map. Billed as a decidedly wholesome premise for educational, entertainment, and life enrichment purposes, this half hour of television has been teetering closer and closer to the description of "circus freak show" lately. And with this latest installment, it has firmly cemented its degradation as a 30-minute excuse to conjure increasingly toxic doses of shock value for an audience that is clearly disrespect.

In a prior episode, a traditional wife was swapped with a single Mom and asked to live her life, sans any kind of marriage relationship, and the complete absence of a"wife" role. I'm sorry - where is the "husband" in this "wife" swap scenario? Is a HUSBAND not a critical element to marriage relationship between a husband and a wife? Apparently not in the minds of ABC.

Tonight, a conservative Christian cum-Tony-Robbins-esque Texas transplant was dropped into the home of a lesbian couple in Arizona, and one woman from that lesbian couple moved into her home to assume the "wife" role there. We are, I gather, supposed to be enlightened and to enjoy the awakening experience as our minds and hearts open by watching the dynamics that ensue.

What actually resulted was unmitigated disgust as we watched the values collide with unapologetic force and predictable results. When asked to speak candidly at the conclusion of her stay in the lesbian home, the traditional Christian mother revealed her true feelings about her experience. She said that she found homosexuality depraved, an illegitimate lifestyle, against her core Biblical belief structure, and something she did not want her children exposed to. She sharply sputtered that the experience of living in that home added nothing to her life.

In response, the lesbian couple individually expressed emotional retorts, asking her "why people like you hurt people like us?" and stating that the intentions of the transplanted "wife" were to add something of value to the lives of her swapped family - not as a sexual predator or someone seeking to cause upset or chaos. There was genuine heartache and mutual frustration on the part of these women as they were faced with outspoken disagreement about their opinions, dynamics, and life choices.

Though words were uttered that made me cringe and shake my head in chagrin, I was not surprised at the overall substance. OF COURSE there was conflict and hurt within a manufactured situation like this. These people are different in ways that a network television show cannot "fix" with saccharine enlightenment in a half hour dedicated to that goal. Realizing this, ABC chooses to exploit those differences. Well, it certainly is predictable - and profitable. All the tears and tension combined into stereotypical slug fest during which we could actually hear the ratings wratchet up.

I have found myself increasingly jaded about most offerings on TV these days. Anything produced by those who focus on making the pretend seem real loses its credibility in my estimation long before it hits the air and begins to slowly choke us with this kind of pollution.

In this case, I am angry that the religious stance of the first couple was not respected and was used to create a situation in which hurtful confrontations were inevitable. I am angry that the creators of this show additionally disrespected all the participants in their obvious and deplorable grasp at ratings and the appeal of audience shock value. I am angry that the feelings and lives of the participants were secondary to the DRAMA that was aimed for when these two very polarized lifestyles were artificially thrust together.

Obviously, the Christian wife in tonight's' episode does not believe that the lesbian relationship is legitimate and, thus, that it does not include a "wife" as part of the structure. The producers deliberately kept her in the dark about the fact that this was a lesbian household she was about to become a temporary part of. The very basis of the household she would be immersed in involves a sexual orientation/choice/lifestyle/preference that CLEARLY violates the religious principles of this woman. That should have absolutely been respected and understood by ABC. None of these people should have been placed into a situation like this without their prior consent because family dynamics, real lives, and children are involved. This "wife swapping" was created specifically to create ratings-generating fireworks. The trouble is, they used 3-dimensional real people as pawns to achieve 2-dimensional goals. That overt duplicity is appalling, not entertaining. Nor was the result, which was the anger of one woman and the heartbreak of another. Are we having fun yet?

Also in evidence was the typical categorized, whitewashed, portrayal of these families. The lesbian couple-led duo was portrayed as being careless, messy, self-involved, undisicplined people - dismissive and unfocused on their child who was allowed an inappropriate degree of choices in her own upbringing. The Christian family was portrayed with a overly-structured, dominant wife at the helm, obscenely ordered home, rigid spirituality which seemed to center around prayers for prosperity and the amorphic goal of "excellence" which is outside the scope of my personal Christian understanding and practice - I must have missed a chapter. Probably right after Leviticus or something) and sweetly robotic, sheltered children.

Hmm. We get it. They are not alike. People are, apparently, quite different from one another.

But not if you are a Christian. If you are a Christian, you find yourself portrayed over and over and over again in exactly the same inane manner by unlikely, fringe elements of your faith. People whose prayers are not for the victims of the tsunami disaster, but for prosperity. People whose lives are ordered around creating excellence-in-dining experiences but who are controlled by their possessions. People whose lives are unlike those of any I know who share my love, pursuit, and passion for the Cross. People I cannot relate but are supposed to represent me. These are people I am supposed to identify with? Please.

The Christian "wife swap" participant and her family represent for me an all-too-familiar stereotype which permeates the modern media, emphasizing further the already shockingly well-subscribed sentiment that all Christians are judgmental, hurtful, discriminatory, mean-spirited, control freak bigots. That if they would only get out of the way with their bothersome traditionalism, this country could progress and evolve. That they live lives of quiet desperation instead of complete and utter freedom found only by standing in the shadow of the Cross. That their unpopular moral beliefs are worthy of ridicule and highlighted as cause for divisiveness and labeled discrimination.

Mean old Christians. Let's stick our tongues out at them. Maybe we should print that on T-shirts and auction them off on Ebay.

If no one were buying into this, I would not waste my time ruminating on it. But because people ARE buying into this toxic, strange, one-dimensional version of Christianity portrayed so willingly by so many mass media sources around us, in DROVES, I am concerned. Being a Christian has quite interesting societal connotations these days. Most perceptions of us are conjured out of imagery created from the most bizarre element of our ranks which are perpetuated as the NORM. To continually portray Christians as hateful, greedy, obsessive, or crazy people is not only complete bunk, it is just plain scary and deeply offensive. But more and more, the vilification of Christianity is being served up on a platter as regular fare for audiences who just gobble it up. In this case, it is being promoted as "Reality TV" by those who seem to think the Osbourne family best represents the epitome of modern, utopian American family life.

Pardon my language, but that's just plain bull%@&*.

Ozzy would be proud.