Gay Marriage, Abortion...and the missing (TV) link

Welcome, guinea pigs. I'm about to test a theory on you.

Well, not exactly test. I'm going to give you an argument for which I have absolutely no proof. Still, I think it makes sense. Maybe you'll agree; maybe not. Regardless, I invite your opinion.

My theory is about gay marriage, on the one hand, and the right to a legal abortion, on the other. According to this theory, there is one important thing that they don't have in common--television.

Have I lost you? OK, I'll try harder.

Unless you've been comatose for the last couple of decades, you have seen a huge change in public opinion regarding gay marriage. Twenty years ago, polls showed that the vast majority of people were against it.

Then, with each passing year, it became more acceptable. Now most people are in favor of letting people of the same sex marry each other.

That's verifiable fact. Dozens of news stories have documented the shift in popular opinion. What's new is what I'm about to say. I believe the biggest reason for the shift in public opinion has been television. I believe that when the TV industry embraces a concept over a period of years, it has the power to change minds on a grand scale.

Two decades ago, there were few gay characters on TV. If you didn't know one in your own life, you probably didn't know one at all. Ellen DeGeneres was still in the closet. And that closet held Anderson Cooper, Neil Patrick Harris and countless others. We were five years away from "Will and Grace" and, seemingly, a zillion years from "Modern Family."

What many people knew about gays at the time was what they were told by family members, religious leaders or others. And what they were told was that gays were perverts and pedophiles and shouldn't be seen, much less glamorized, on TV.

But then things started to change.TV programmers, acting independently but with encouragement from GLAAD, made gays part of the cavalcade of TV characters. In addition to "Will and Grace," gay characters popped up everywhere fom "Desperate Housewives" to "Roseanne." And they weren't scary. They were regular folks, seemingly entitled  to the same rights as everyone else. In fact, you'd have to be some sort of cold-hearted creep to deny the obvious love between Mitch and Cameron on "Modern Family."

With each passing TV season, the needle moved steadily to one side. Now it has moved so far that even those who still oppose gay marriage concede their side has lost. Chalk it up to TV.

But what has this got to do with abortion? Simply this. More than forty years ago, the Supreme Court, on a 7-2 vote, ruled that there is a Constitutional right to safe and legal abortions. You might reasonably expect that, after that amount of time, the controversy would be over, the issue settled. As with housing rights and the right to an attorney (Miranda), you might expect most people would accept the decision and move on.

But they haven't. New surveys indicate that the percentage of people opposed to legal abortion has, if anything, actually increased slightly in recent years. Just in the last few years, legislatures in Red States have passed a tsunami of new laws to restrict legal abortions and punish those who provide them. Meanwhile, the lack of public outcry has been deafening.

I maintain that the difference between the public's embrace of gay marriage and its withholding of support for the legal right to abortion has to do with the way these issues have been presented on TV.

While we have been given enough characters on TV to populate a Gay Pride parade, virtually no producer or network has been willing to show us a character who avails herself of a legal abortion.

On the rare occasion that TV deals with an unwanted pregnancy (the sitcom "Reba," for example), there is not so much as a sentence of dialogue in which abortion is presented as an option. Almost always, the choice is between having the baby or giving it up, as if Roe v. Wade happened in some parallel universe.

Can you recall the last drama in which a woman chose to end a pregnancy through abortion? Me neither, though it actually happens tens of thousands of times a year in the U.S.

It's as if producers and networks, having successfully taken on the challenge of winning hearts and minds in support of equal rights for gay people, have concluded they have only enough courage to consider one social issue every 50 years.

For those who believe in the legal right to abortion, that's a shame. Had there been TV shows in which normal, everyday women chose abortion--as they do in real life for many reasons--it is likely we would not still be fighting a battle decided decades ago. It's even possible that a few doctors might still be alive.

At least, that's my theory.