Having babies not "in the Bushian sense"

[question everything]

From TIME magazine article about the TV programs "Friends" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040419-610073,00.html

Like all romantic comedies, Friends tends to end its seasons with weddings or births. And yet none of the Friends has had a baby the "normal" way — in the Bushian sense — through procreative sex between a legally sanctioned husband and wife. Chandler and Monica adopt. Ross has kids by his lesbian ex-wife and his unwed ex-girlfriend. Phoebe carries her half brother and his wife's triplets (one of the funniest, sweetest and creepiest situations ever--"My sister's gonna have my baby!" he whoops). As paleontologist Ross might put it, Friends is, on a Darwinian level, about how the species adapts to propagate itself when the old nuclear-family methods don't work.


The message of Friends, in other words, is that there is no normal anymore and that Americans — at least the plurality needed to make a sitcom No. 1--accept that. (To the show's discredit, it used a cast almost entirely of white-bread heteros to guide us through all that otherness.) In January 1996, when Ross's ex-wife married her lesbian lover, the episode raised scant controversy, and most of that because Candace Gingrich — the lesbian sister of Newt, then Speaker of the House — presided over the ceremony. "This is just another zooey episode of the justifiably popular Friends," yawned USA Today. Sure, sitcoms like Roseanne had introduced gays earlier — but it's not as though that had rendered gay marriage uncontroversial, then or now. The bigger difference was in attitude, both the show's and the audience's.

What was radical about Friends was that it assumed these situations were not shocking but a fact of life. Maybe your dad wasn't a drag queen, Friends says, but maybe your parents split up, or maybe you had a confirmed-bachelor uncle whom the family, whatever its politics, had come to accept. If it was important for Murphy Brown to show that a single woman could have a baby in prime time — and spark a war with a Vice President — it was as important that Friends showed that a single woman could have a baby on TV's biggest sitcom, sparking nothing but "awwws."