Our readers write
Praises new foothill restaurant
I’ve lived in the area for over 20 years and currently live near the Urartu restaurant. I would recommend it to anyone. My son and I ate there and the food was delicious. The tables are beautiful; [it would be ] a great place for a large gathering (wedding, etc.).
I am blind and I was treated well.
Enjoy!
— Arlene Barker
La Crescenta
Is TV programming anti-marriage?
Turn on the TV any night and you’ll see a glut of shows centered on attractive swinging singles with active, exciting sex lives. Programs centered on a family unit — once a TV staple — are almost non-existent these days, and if you do come across a show that features a married couple, chances are they are shown as mismatched, unsatisfied in their sex lives and emotionally unfulfilled. Today’s TV landscape is littered with desperate housewives and philandering husbands. As proof one need look no further than CBS’s summer bomb, Swingtown. Though TV producers and executives would have us believe they are merely daring to tell the truth and “hold a mirror up” to real life, Swingtown paints a picture of middle-class suburbia few Americans can, nor want to, identify with.
But Swingtown is not alone in its campaign to undermine marriage. A recent study by the Parents Television Council ( www.parentstv.org) found that prime-time broadcast television overwhelmingly favors non-marital sex to marital sex. On TV, sex in the context of marriage is either non-existent or is depicted as burdensome, rather than as an expression of love and commitment. By contrast, extra-marital or adulterous sexual relationships are depicted with greater frequency, and overwhelmingly, as a positive experience. With graphic sexual content, gruesome violence and explicit language filling up the airwaves, TV’s negative treatment of marriage may seem a trivial matter [however] TV sets a powerful example. It’s why minority groups are right to be concerned about how they are represented on television — or whether they are represented at all. It’s why groups like the American Association of Psychiatry and the American Medical Association are right to be concerned when violence is treated as an acceptable solution to conflict on television. If America’s children grow up watching TV programs that teach them that marriage is a soul-killing hell on earth, while sexual flings with an ever-changing cast of partners is not only fun, but risk- and consequence-free, we’d have to be naïve to believe it won’t shape their world-view and affect their decisions.
Therefore, yes, there is definitely a bias against marriage on TV today. Surely TV writers can do better justice to an institution widely regarded as beneficial to individuals’ health and happiness, as stabilizing to society, and as vital to a child’s well-being and chances for success in life.
— Michele Mac Neal,
L.A./Foothills Chapter,
Parents Television Council
Ponders ‘new’ marriage definition
Marriage has been redefined: California just banned the words bride and groom from the marriage license. Instead it is “Party A” and “Party B”.
I invite folks to look it up and get the message directly “from the horse’s mouth” at https://www.cdph.ca.gov/HealthInfo/news/Documents/Sample%20VS123%20(6-08).pdf.
The site includes the actual/printable license and certificate of marriage.
— Pat McLeod
La Crescenta