Category: Keepers

I happened to meet Peter Tatchell, the legendary and vocal international gay rights activist, last week in London. In the 1990s, he had publicly challenged my book, "Virtually Normal," and its advocacy of marriage equality, from the vantage point of the gay left. A decade and a half later, we are on the same page. But he was always an "outer" and I wasn't; and that kept us somewhat at odds. But just as you cannot libel the dead, I don't think you can out them either. And Peter's reminiscence of younger Whitney's closest friend, Robyn Crawford, is a touching one, and I see no reason to disbelieve it:

When I met them, it was obvious they were madly in love. Their intimacy and affection was so sweet and romantic.  They held hands in the back of the car like teenage sweethearts. Clearly more than just friends, they were a gorgeous couple and so happy together. To see their love was infectious and uplifting.

Whitney was happiest and at the peak of her career when she was with Robyn. Sadly, she suffered family and church pressure to end her greatest love of all. She was fearful of the effects that lesbian rumours might have on her family, reputation and career. Eventually she succumbed.

The sudden and horribly self-destructive marriage to Bobby Brown surprised many. But until reading Peter's piece, I did not realize that Brown had himself said that Whitney married him in part to put behind rumors of her love for Robyn, to whom she dedicated her albums. He wrote that the marriage was

"doomed from the very beginning. I think we got married for all the wrong reasons. Now, I realize Whitney had a different agenda than I did when we got married. I believe her agenda was to clean up her image, while mine was to be loved and have children. The media was accusing her of having a bisexual relationship with her assistant, Robin [sic] Crawford. Since she was the American Sweetheart and all, that didn’t go too well with her image. In Whitney’s situation, the only solution was to get married and have kids. That would kill all speculation, whether it was true or not."

Robyn wrote a moving tribute after Houston's death, reflecting on its happening around Valentine's Day. These paragraphs leapt out at me:

People thought they had to protect her. She hated that. And that’s what people don’t understand: She was always the one doing the driving … She was working hard to keep herself together, and I think she felt that if she admitted any feeling of sadness or weakness she would crumble. One time, back when we were young, we were out, we were partying, and I said, "Listen, I have to go. I’m tired. I can’t make it." And she looked at me with her eyes wide and said, “I’ve got to make it.”

And that was Whitney. She could not pick up the phone, and that meant it was too painful. I have never spoken about her until now. And she knew I wouldn’t. She was a loyal friend, and she knew I was never going to be disloyal to her. I was never going to betray her. Now I can’t believe that I’m never going to hug her or hear her laughter again.

We can never know what's in someone's heart. I hope for her sake that Houston wasn't gay and didn't suffer because she couldn't face it – for religious or professional or social reasons, or for reasons within her even she could not understand. Robyn, her assistant, describes a love that could just as well have been profound intimate friendship, rather than full intimacy. But these barriers are more porous for women than many men, and if she was at heart a naturally lesbian woman – as her ex-husband claims – it makes her suffering so much deeper and more important to understand. It reveals the deep toll of suppressing your core emotional identity for the sake of "making it" or simply because of social pressure and shame. Many men and women caught in this vise suffer for it, sometimes unconsciously seek punishment for it, or try to numb it with the pursuit of professional perfection, or rigid religious fundamentalism, or alcohol, or drugs, or pure, unrelenting, soul-punishing denial. It's a horrible way to live – enough, at some level, to make you want to die. 

Deep down, I think this was the core tragedy of Michael Jackson. He never felt the validation of unconditional love as a child, as is the case with so many gay kids (whether he was gay or not). I hope Whitney didn't endure the same agony – or worse, once did experience unconditional love and then ran away to punish herself for it for life. Both Jackson and Houston were musical geniuses. But what came through their voices, to me at least, was not just those near-divine moments of joy, but the sincerity of the visceral pain that laced every note.

I pray their pain is over now; and that their wounded souls are being healed by their Father's unconditional love for ever.

As the GOP moves relentlessly off the far right cliff, the country is edging relentlessly toward accepting the humanity of gay couples and our marriages and relationships. But Chris Christie's veto – after New Jersey's legislature backed equality – and Maryland's upcoming referendum – after its legislature and governor passed a marriage equality law – form a sad last ditch.

To give some perspective, when we first started this push for marriage equality 23 years ago or so, we were told this was an interesting if obviously nuts idea. But the opposition was adamant about one thing: the courts had nothing whatever to do with ensuring minority rights, if that minority were gay. Going the court route was undemocratic. I remember being lectured on this by the Congressional Committee in the DOMA hearings in 1996.

And I saw their point at the time when public opinion was so hostile. I was always more leery of the court strategy than my friend and ally in the fledgling movement, Evan Wolfson, at the time. I didn't want a Roe-style over-reach. I thought that public education and state legislative debate was the right way forward. If in the end, the courts reacted to a shift in public opinion, and we won the constitutional and legal arguments, great. But I thought state legislatures were the main way to go.

So we did. And guess what? They moved the goalposts on us. When we actually began to win in state legislatures, such as California (twice!), or New Hampshire, or now Maryland and New Jersey and Washington State, that process became suddenly unacceptable – and undemocratic! – as well. Even on an issue many hold to be a core civil right, we were told the courts were irrelevant and now that the legislatures were irrelevant. This was particularly odd coming from conservatives who at one point in time were strong believers in restraints on majority tyranny. But this is what a legislative debate can do that no referendum can, and it's why the founders established a republic not a pure democracy:

I am not afraid of referendums in New Jersey or Maryland. Let's do all we can to win them. The polls are now increasingly on our side. But the way in which a tiny 2- 3 percent minority seeking basic civil equality has been forced now to be subject to state referendums, even after winning legislative victories, strikes me as revealing. It's basically an attack on representative government, a resort to the forms of decision-making which maximize the potential for anonymous bigotry and minimize the importance of representative government, a core achievement of Anglo-American democracy, that can help enhance reason of the accountable against the sometimes raw prejudice of the majority.

Christie is a man whose candor I admire in many ways. But this was an act of cowardice and unfairness and a misguided disregard for representative democracy. How many other duly enacted laws must now be sent to the referendum process for final judgment. Why have a legislature at all? And this from the party that claims to defend the Constitution.

A very helpful piece is in the current Rolling Stone which brings together all the recent developments in this administration’s volte-face on medical pot. It’s a staggering betrayal of the initial pledge to let states administer their own medical marijuana laws without DEA harrassment and intimidation. In fact, Obama’s war on medical marijuana is now worse than Bush’s. Money quote:

Invoking an obscure provision of the tax code meant to trip up drug kingpins, the IRS now maintains that pot dispensaries can deduct only one expense – ironically, the cost of the marijuana itself. All other normal costs of doing business – including employee salaries and benefits, rent, equipment, electricity and water – have been denied.

The agency has used the provision to go after Harborside Health Center, one of the largest and most respected providers of medical cannabis in California. Its Oakland branch, serving 83,000 patients in conforming with state law, paid more than $1 million in city taxes last year – placing it in the top 10 percent of local businesses. “It’s incredibly tightly run and very, very professional,” says Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance. “But it’s also big – and it may be that big is bad as far as the feds are concerned.” Slapped with an IRS bill for $2.5 million in back taxes, Harborside now faces bankruptcy. “It’s profoundly inaccurate to characterize us as a ‘drug-trafficking’ organization,” says Harborside president Steve DeAngelo. “We are a nonprofit community-service organization that helps sick and suffering people get the medicine they need to be well. This is not an attempt to tax us – it’s an attempt to tax us out of existence.”

There is no question that marijuana has profoundly powerful medical uses; and is far less damaging than alcohol as a recreational drug, both in terms of personal health and social effects. What Obama is doing is causing sickness and death. It seems to me that the Obama generation who helped elect this president need to go to war against this betrayal. Every time you are sent a fundraising email or in any way contacted by the Obama election campaign, tell them to call you back when they call this war off. Hit them where it hurts. Heckle him and his surrogates whenever you can.

Holder and Obama have betrayed us on this. Make sure they hear from you.

There is so much I disagree with Pat Buchanan on – from World War II to marriage equality to immigration to my love of a multi-racial and multi-cultural society – that I could write a book in it. But let me say something in his defense: however repellent some of his views, he is intellectually honest. Yes, publicly bigoted, sometimes outrageous, a flame-thrower, a reactionary who flirted at times with what only can be called neo-fascism. But here’s another thing he has always been: true to his own ideas and a gifted writer. He truly believes what he says and has read and researched a huge amount and has thought carefully about his extreme out-of-the-mainstream views. He is a serious figure in that respect. Compared with Al Sharpton or Ed Schultz, he is a paragon of intellectual integrity. He is not a propagandist. He is a passionate writer who loves nothing more than a good argument with a worthy opponent – and he has a serious sense of humor to boot. That his ideas are often repelling should precisely be why he should stay on MSNBC and defend his views against the smartest critiques that can be found. We should stop silencing people and keep debating them. The idea that he was not the target of much subterranean leftist outrage and pressure to fire him, as my colleague Howie Kurtz reports, seems highly unlikely to me. Yes, as Howie rightly reports, Buchanan’s latest inflammatory book was the casus belli. But Phil Griffin’s views of the book and an underground campaign to fire him from the professional left are not mutually exclusive explanations. I believe Pat on this. The pressure on MSNBC management to get rid of this fly in their propagandistic ointment must have been intense – and came in part from two of the more pernicious liberal interest groups in DC, the Gay Human Rights Campaign and the ADL. Replacing him with Michael Steele – who makes Sarah Palin look like Susan Sontag – is to add insult to injury. In many ways, I admired MSNBC for keeping him on for so long. Fox has not a single liberal of his intelligence, experience and background. But they are pure propaganda. MSNBC is, in this move, now completely indistinguishable from Fox in that respect. I have a personal story to relate about Buchanan as well, which Mark Warren noted in his recent profile of me.

Sixteen years ago, when I came out as HIV-positive and quit TNR’s editorship, Buchanan, who had sparred relentlessly in public with me over gay equality, wrote me a personal hand-written note. He wrote he was saddened by what he heard – which was then regarded as an imminent death sentence – and wanted to say how he would pray that I would survive, if only so we could continue to argue and fight and debate for many more years. He was one of only two Washingtonians who did such a thing. I was moved beyond words. But he knew I loved a good argument as well. Over a gulf of ideological and philosophical difference, we could debate reasonably.

He’s a complicated man and I will not defend for a second his views on many things. But he is also a compassionate and decent man in private and an honest intellectual in public. It says everything about the polarization of our discourse and the evolution of cable news into rival sources of propaganda that this ornery figure, still churning out ideas and books while others his age are well in retirement, is now banished.

For shame. Another step backward from real debate on cable “news”.

It's hard to imagine in the more meritocratic world of the blogosphere and the web in general that an exhausted incoherent hack like Richard Cohen would have any platform at all. But there he still sits on Fred Hiatt's op-ed page, churning out dated, brain-dead dreck week after week. His latest column really could have been written at any point during any Democratic administration since Carter.

His current (and previous) hero is Robert Kagan, a man who famously championed a war against Iraq that killed 100,000 Iraqis, 5,000 Americans, permanently maimed tens of thousands more, cost up to a trillion dollars, and ended by empowering Iran. None of this is mentioned by Cohen in using Kagan to condescend to Obama. None of it. And in a column allegedly devoted to American power and influence in the world, Cohen makes no mention of the massive events of the last decade – the rise and rise of the new economic super-powers of China, India and Brazil. Yes, he's that lazy. He knows as much about foreign policy as I do about how to apply mascara.

He's also completely incoherent, as the National Interest points out. Is American power in relative decline? Cohen uses Iran as an example to say yes:

Russia will not cooperate on Iran. Neither will China. The two even vetoed a U.N. resolution regarding Syria. India will continue to buy Iranian oil, and the Iranians themselves have learned that they need only promise to behave and Washington will shimmer in relief.

Then he says no. I love this sentence:

[A] limited America still has unlimited possibilities and solemn responsibilities.

If a freshman in International Relations wrote that sentence, I'd give him a D. And let's look at the country Cohen focuses on, Iran, as an example of Obama's failure to wield power as well as Kagan's puppet, George W. Bush. Here's Dennis Ross, a man long dedicated to Israel's and America's interests in the region:

Iran cannot do business with or obtain credit from any reputable international bank, nor can it easily insure its ships or find energy investors. According to Iran’s oil ministry, the energy sector needs more than $100 billion in investments to revitalize its aging infrastructure; it now faces a severe shortfall.

New American penalties on Iran’s central bank and those doing business with it have helped trigger an enormous currency devaluation. In the last six weeks, the Iranian rial has declined dramatically against the dollar, adding to the economic woes Iran is now confronting.

Grain is sitting on ships that won’t unload their cargoes in Iranian ports because suppliers haven’t been paid; Iranian oil is being stored on tankers as Iran’s buyers demand discounts to purchase it; and even those countries that continue to do business with Iran are not paying in dollars. India plans to buy 45 percent of its oil from Iran using rupees, meaning that Iran will be forced to buy Indian goods that it may not want or need.

I cite this one example to show just what a joke Cohen is. And the key to this Iranian isolation is not Bob Kagan's catastrophic Iraq war, but Obama's careful internationalist rallying of support for crippling sanctions over three years, while keeping it clear he is ready to negotiate at any time to accept peaceful Iranian nuclear power. This is emphatically not Kagan's vision, which did far more to destroy American soft and hard power in eight years than at any time since Carter. It is Obama's. And yet this is Cohen's conclusion:

The president talks of a role cut and pasted from a magazine and claims a policy, outlook and demeanor that haven’t been his.

The man would be laughed out of the blogosphere. But he remains ensconced for life in Fred Hiatt's bosom, where torture apologists and Netanyahu sock-puppets find sinecures.

Gallup finds the president's standing among Catholics basically unchanged since the furor engineered by Benedict's hand-picked reactionary bishops over contraception and the religious freedom of the hierarchy. It doesn't surprise me. If the Bishops had picked abortion as their planned attack on the president, and he had somehow (inconceivably) fought back, this would be very very different. But the hierarchy picked the one issue – contraception – almost none of their flock agrees with them on. And notice how there seems little difference between the more devout Catholics and the less dedicated to attending Mass.

I think the revised compromise will help him even more – and the Bishops' refusal to accept it will hurt them even more. And I think this will be particularly true among Catholics who, like me, regard abortion as far more morally troubling than contraception. Because many of us support contraception not just because we don't think non-procreative sex is a sin, but because, for fertile heterosexuals, we think it lowers the rate and risk of abortion.

If you really oppose abortion, you should back contraception, especially for those women least likely to afford it outside health insurance plans. But the new rigid fundamentalism of the John Paul II and Benedict XVI hierarchy cannot allow such moral trade-offs. But trading off the rape of children for the reputation of the church? Suddenly they get pragmatic.

I'm sorry but I find the protectors of child rapists preaching to women about contraception to be a moral obscenity. When all the implicated bishops and the Pope resign, ther replacements will have standing to preach.

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So much for Howie Kurtz’s sense that Obama had screwed up badly on the decision to include contraception in health insurance plans for women employed by Catholic-run institutions open to the general public. The latest NYT poll shows a big majority for the Obama original decision, which has now been adjusted further to keep the Bishops’ hands clean of any direct involvement. Here are the numbers:

61 percent of Americans support federally-mandated contraception coverage for religiously-affiliated employers; 31 percent oppose such coverage. The number is similar among self-professed Catholics surveyed: 61 percent said they support the Obama administration’s rule, while 32 percent oppose it.

Majorities of both men and women said they are in favor of the rule, though support among women is especially pronounced, with 66 percent supporting and 26 percent opposing it. Among men, 55 percent of men are in favor; 38 percent object.

Two-thirds of women back Obama over the hierarchy. 61 percent of Catholics back the president over the Pope. But a Pew survey shows a different result, with a narrow majority favoring exemptions for religiously-affiliated institutions, perhaps because it reflects far greater awareness among seniors of the issue, and because evangelicals have rallied to the call for religious freedom. Yes, on this issue, evangelicals are more opposed to the Obama rule than Catholics – even though evangelicals have no theological objection to the pill:

Awareness of the controversy is also far higher among older adults than among the young. Six-in-ten (60%) adults ages 18-29 have heard nothing about the issue, compared with just 24% among those 50 and older. Among people ages 30-49, 43% have not heard about it.

The Pew poll shows classic polarization with Independents split right down the middle: 48 – 46, within the margin of error. The NYT poll is one day more up to date.

Santorum has almost caught Romney in the national poll of polls:

PPP's poll from over the weekend puts Santorum ahead 38 to 23:

Part of the reason for Santorum's surge is his own high level of popularity. 64% of voters see him favorably to only 22% with a negative one. But the other, and maybe more important, reason is that Republicans are significantly souring on both Romney and Gingrich. Romney's favorability is barely above water at 44/43, representing a 23 point net decline from our December national poll when he was +24 (55/31). Gingrich has fallen even further. A 44% plurality of GOP voters now hold a negative opinion of him to only 42% with a positive one. That's a 34 point drop from 2 months ago when he was at +32 (60/28).

Mataconis is skeptical of PPP. Jesse Singal wonders how effective Romney's inevitable attacks on Santorum will be:

[A] lot of the old Santorum stuff about to get churned up, the most infamous of it his comparison of homosexuality to bestiality, is unlikely to bother conservative voters all that much. His views on social issues could make him a semi-poisonous general-election candidate, but in a primary — particularly a primary currently starring Romney? Less so.

Pete Spiliakos, who likes Santorum quite a bit, worries about his chances in the general election:

Take the whole women in combat thing.  His point about group dynamics isn’t crazy, but he is just off.  He just isn’t quick enough or disciplined enough to deflect these kinds of questions or make his point in an unalienating way.  I don’t think the women in combat thing hurts him, but it is a warning.  If Santorum is somehow the Republican nominee, he is going to get suckered into these kinds of culture war fights every couple of weeks.  And this is Santorum being good.  He isn’t that bright, he isn’t that articulate, and he can’t be fixed.

I've studied Santorum for years, read his alarming book, It Takes A Family, and if you'll forgive the plug, you'll find my review and analysis of it in the chapter in The Conservative Soul in the chapter about the "The Theocon Project."

He is easily the politician most hostile to individual liberty on the right. He believes states have every right to ban contraception, all abortion, and any legal protections for gay couples. He disavows any secular, Enlightenent view of America's founding. For him, freedom only counts if you adhere to the current fundamentalist rigidity of the Benedict XVI church. I've cited this before, but here he is on freedom:

This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

Notice he explicitly cites the bedroom as the place where big government can intervene. If you are not reproducing as the Vatican demands, legal penalties are in principle possible. There is no public-private distinction. His mentor, Robbie George, takes the view that in principle, the state also has the right to penalize masturbation with criminal penalties, a position flushed out of him in the Prop 2 trial in Colorado. The only reason the two would not actively prosecute gay couples for having sex or straight couples for using condoms is for prudential reasons: it's not practical. But in theory, they'd have the Catholic church's most reactionary elements dictating your freedoms.

If you believe in individual freedom, this country has no greater opponent than Rick Santorum. And for three years, the GOP has tried to tell us that the Tea Party was about extending freedom and ending debt rather than extending the power of Christianist Big Government. We know better now.

I'd like to respond in part to Joe Scarborough on Meet The Press over his interpretation of my new Newsweek cover-story on the politics of contraception and religious freedom. I didn't say this last week of political frenzy was an advance elaborate trap by Obama, set months in advance. In fact, as we know, if anything, it was a trap set by the increasingly political Catholic Bishops to wage war on this president. Over to Joe Morning:

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Here's the paragraph Joe, I think, misreads a bit:

The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base. I’ve found by observing this president closely for years that what often seem like short-term tactical blunders turn out in the long run to be strategically shrewd. And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.

I'm talking about the quick compromise, not the original decision. But I do think that defending free contraception for all women, as already mandated by the EEOC in 2000 (which the Bush administration did nothing to change) is a winner for Obama in the long run, especially since the Bishops, after an initially restrained response, have now fused themselves with Mitch McConnell, as pure allies of the Republican right. In fact, some in the GOP want contraception banned in any healthcare plan offered even by secular corporations who happen to be run by orthodox Catholics:

Behind Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), some Republicans want not only to repeal the mandate on faith-based non-profits, but to extend waivers to any group or person who objects to the coverage requirements for either religious or moral reasons.

The Bishops fail to see any difference. They want contraception, practised by 98 percent of Catholic women, and critical to preventing higher rates of abortion, kept out of any healthcare plan an employer decides.

Let them try. Most, I believe, will see the Obama compromise as a sane if difficult one. Finding a way to ensure all women get contraception in line with the 2000 EEOC ruling and existing laws in many states, including New York and California, while keeping the Church hierarchy from any contact with implementation or direct payment for something they object to is exactly what we elected this president for.

If you have the time, read the piece. The thing I find most politically damaging for the GOP is the oxygen and funding this will give Santorum:

Obama’s greatest skill is in getting his opponents to overreach and self-destruct. And this issue could not be more tailor-made to benefit the candidate with real potential pull with far-right-wing Catholics and evangelicals: Santorum. If the GOP really makes this issue central in the next month or so, Santorum (whose campaign claims to have raised $2.2 million in the two days following his victories last week) is by far the likeliest candidate to benefit. It could finally unite the Christian fundamentalist right behind him—especially since Romneycare contained exactly the same provisions on contraception that Obamacare did before last week’s compromise was announced.

That’s right: Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue. This could very well be the issue that finally galvanizes the religious right, especially in the South. Imagine how Santorum could use that on Super Tuesday. In fact, it could be the issue that wins him the nomination. And do you really think that would hurt Obama in the fall?

Meep, meep.

Kate Aurthur was transfixed by “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills“:

Critics I respect wanted Bravo to axe the entire season before it even aired, and others were repulsed throughout its run. I’ve felt the opposite; to me, scripted television has never done anything this enthralling.

Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it enthralling, but it sure took reality television into a zone it is designed never to enter: reality. The obvious goal of the fantastically successful Bravo series – a personal addiction to which I blame entirely on Aaron – is to create petty squabbles between rich, pampered women, preferably about inane things like where Lisa Vanderpump will hold her daughter’s bachelorette party in Las Vegas. The second feature is classic Depression era porn: such fantastic obscene luxury and wealth paraded like a 1930s movie set in aristocratic New York apartments with massive sweeping staircases and near-mandatory black tie.

But on the Beverly Hills season, two things actually happened beyond orchestrated pissing matches. First, one of them was clearly on some sort of drugs and was deteriorating in front of our eyes. Second, and much more dramatic, one of the more fragile of the golden female parakeets got progressively more disturbed and panic-stricken and volatile.

Her husband, a very tightly wound and humorless executive, gave me the creeps from the start. And then halfway through this season, in one compelling scene, in a conversation in which Taylor demanded total honesty from her friends about their views of her increasingly unraveling personality, one of them blurted out that she had already told the group that her spouse was beating her, even breaking her jaw. Suddenly, the subtext became text.

Bravo clearly panicked. Reality shows are not supposed to be about reality. There’s usually more reality in scripted sitcoms and cartoons. So they removed any footage they might have had revealing the abuse, kept the sub-plot off-stage, built tension, and then simply cut the period after Taylor finally quit her marriage after one last bruise on her face and her husband committed suicide. We got a bewildering swift mention of the suicide in the beginning of the final episode before we got on to the more serious question of whether the outside air-conditioning was sufficient for a Beverly Hills marriage tent.

But then we had the first of a three-part reunion. It pole-axed me. They read aloud some of the truly horrific texts Taylor’s clearly disturbed husband had sent his wife on her birthday. The emotional abuse in the words was somehow more upsetting than the off-stage physical threats and bruises. It reflected what was a poisonous, awful, destructive marriage – the kind that liberalized divorce laws saved so many women from. And then Taylor spoke these words (I paraphrase):

I almost wanted him to hit me during these fights just to get it over with.

It was the reallest moment I have ever witnessed on reality television. It gave you a glimpse into the mindset of battered wives in abusive relationships and marriages – and the living hell that follows them every day. So why on earth go on a reality show? The wife suggested that she did it in order to stop the abuse – to get a third party to intervene and understand. The husband’s motive? I have no idea. But being a wife-beater on national television must have been an ordeal. But here’s what’s unforgivable: they have a 5-year-old daughter exposed to all of this, a daughter who was with her mother when they found her father’s body: “She knew something was bad. The first thing she said was, ‘Did Daddy do something dumb?'” Armstrong recalled.

I find marital abuse so horrifying I cannot express my feelings. That simple sentence – “I almost wanted him to hit me during these fights just to get it over with” – stuck with me for days. The show trod a very fine line between brutal exploitation of these people’s lives and absurd glorification of them.

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that the combination took one life, arguably saved another, and took on a toll on a five year old whose longterm consequences we will never know. Pray for her.

(Photo: Kennedy Armstrong, Taylor Armstrong and Russell Armstrong attend the Lollipop Theatre Networks 3rd Annual Game Day at Nickelodeon Studios on May 7, 2011 in Burbank, California. By Todd Williamson/Getty.)