My best girl and I frequently binge-watch television shows, especially in the summer when there are few new network show episodes, but really all year, to some extent. Early on, we bought or were given some boxed sets of DVDs of show we liked, so they're fun to go through now that we have some time to do so.
One such show was "Boston Legal", which ran for five years about a dozen years back. It was often as much comedy as legal drama, featuring a team in a law firm in Boston taking on odd cases. The quirks of the show included occasional side jokes about the "network" or using the term "this episode", subtlely referencing the fact that they were, indeed, a TV show.
And, of course, it was a bit odd that two of the three named partners in the firm had gone a bit senile, one ("Denny Crane") played by William Shatner (who, at 75, referred to his creeping Alzheimer's as "mad cow disease" but still practiced law, at least a little -- the other was almost never seen after the first few episodes).
Another core "thing" in the show was the relationship between Shatner's character and one of the younger lead attorneys, "Alan Shore" (played by James Spader). Both were incorrigible skirt-chasers, Shore the classic liberal with no concern about treating all women as sex objects (clearly a Kennedy relative), Crane the old conservative with (naturally) lots of guns. Let's just say there was no secret about the political leanings of the producer and writers.
Last night we were watching an episode from the fifth and final season. In it, a fairly mature and well-spoken 15-year-old girl came to the firm for representation. She had immigrated to the USA from China, and gotten pregnant. Her father was deceased, and the mother refused to give her consent for the abortion the girl wanted, consent needed under 2008 Massachusetts law, we assume.
That law allowed for a judge to override the parent and allow the abortion, at least as portrayed in the episode. That was the girl's petition; she had gone to the firm to ask for them to go to court to get the permission. She was intelligent and rehearsed, knowing all her lines about how raising a child would cause irreparable harm to her and stall her education and career.
Shore and Crane were not representing her, but frequently discussed the case. In those discussions, Shore (this was 2008) was positively panicked over the thought of Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, being reversed by the then-construction of the Supreme Court. Panicked, I tell you, as if going back to the rule of law before that ruling would end the country as we knew it.
He was in his office alone, cogitating on the notion when Denny Crane walked into his office. That would be Denny Crane, the once-great attorney and founder of the firm that bore his name, but now, mentally crippled by the onset of Alzheimer's disease and morally bankrupt as well. Yet he made right then the single most profound point we would ever hear on the show.
The setting? Shore had just discovered that the reason the child wanted to abort the baby was not about her own career or education, but because she was following a Chinese cultural leaning favoring male children, and discovered the baby was female. This, Shore clearly thought, was morally troubling even in the face of his abortion-for-all mentality.
I'm quoting from memory here as to what Crane said, so forgive me.
"You people [liberals like Shore] need Roe v. Wade, Alan. You need it because you can always point to it as the bedrock law that keeps you from having to confront your own morality, morality that says abortion is actually wrong. You can't actually say that, of course, so Roe gives you the legal spine to avoid actually having to decide that something is right or wrong. Without Roe, Alan, you'd have to look in the mirror."
I immediately made notes for today's piece. Can you blame me? Brilliance, utter brilliance from a geriatric, gun-toting lawyer with mad cow disease, on a left-leaning network TV show.
Now we just have to find a liberal with actual morals to understand it.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton
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