Culture Briefs

Ex-Capades

“The Ice Capades is dead. America’s most glorious ice carnival, which barnstormed civic centers for nearly six decades, vanished about five years ago. That its death has gone largely unreported is puzzling. …

“[T]he pitiful decline of the Ice Capades began in the 1980s. Desperate to whip up spectacle in an age of cartoons and video games, Ice Capades producers piled on decades’ worth of pop detritus. …

“Meanwhile, the Ice Capades faced a deeper problem: Figure skating had become too respectable. The brilliance of Olympians Dorothy Hamill and Scott Hamilton convinced the public that figure skating was a legitimate sport that deserved its own stage. No longer would they suffer the antics of the cartoon characters to see the Olympians perform. Nor would the Olympians: Hamilton joined the Ice Capades in 1984, then bolted to found Stars on Ice, a tour that showcased Olympic-style skating. … Meanwhile, Disney on Ice … lured away the wide-eyed pre-adolescents.”

— Bryan Curtis, writing on “The Ice Capades,” March 16 in Slate at www.slate.com

Secular confusion

“Most of my professional life is spent interacting with secular liberal academics. What I tell them is that they are living off the cultural capital of Judeo-Christian moral understanding and depleting it quickly. Most liberal academics say they favor marriage and just want it to be available to homosexuals and heterosexuals on equal terms. …

“I try to show them the unsavory logical consequences of their willingness to equate sodomy with marital sexual love. To justify same-sex ‘marriage’ one must abandon the concept of marriage as a one-flesh union of sexually complementary spouses. But if we do that … we eliminate the rational ground for restricting marriage to two people (as opposed to three or five or eight) and for regarding marriage as intrinsically requiring mutual pledges of exclusivity and fidelity. People who accept same-sex ‘marriage’ have no basis of principle (as opposed to mere sentiment or subjective preference) for opposing polygamy, polyamory (group marriage), promiscuity (‘open marriages’), and the like. What then is left of marriage? Nothing.”

— Princeton University professor Robert P. George, interviewed by Marvin Olasky in the March 5 issue of World

How you’ll know

“With Dan Rather’s departure from the ‘CBS Evening News’ last week, there has been a lot of debate about whether or not there is a liberal bias in the mainstream media — as if that were a debatable point. …

“You will know the mainstream media is no longer biased. …

“When whistleblowers Linda Tripp and Manuel Miranda are treated by the media in a manner comparable to the way Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill and Joe Wilson were treated. …

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