Margaret and I were just in the middle of watching a rerun of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (yes, yes, I know, not only have we no lives, we also have no taste). The show hit a commercial, and as is our wont, we began channel-surfing for something else to occupy our attention and keep us from meaningful conversation with each other. We happened on a channel showing a program about a small town in Utah where polygamy is pretty much the standard for the community. We watched a few minutes before returning to SVU.

During the next break, we flipped back to the polygamy show. It was at that point that I realized that this program was being aired on….Country Music Television.

Does anyone else find that just a little, um, disturbing? Without passing judgement on the act of polygamy itself (after all, I’m one of those whack-jobs that want to make it legal for a man to marry a turtle), is marital deviancy in the back country really the kind of topic with which CMT wants their viewer demographic associated?

To my mind, there seems only a step or two between this and producing an hour-long program about marrying your first cousin. 😯