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Poldark Times

by DICK CHENEY

Poldark
creator Debbie Horsfield

What remains of National Review magazine after William F. Buckley expired and left the reins to a bunch of cranky weirdos who loathe homosexuals presented a symposium this week. The topic was the Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage. None of their regular writers were included in the symposium — besides opinion pieces by presidential candidate Ted Cruz and columnist Kevin Williamson, no one wrote at length on the decision. "The Editors" did weigh in, explaining that it was super unfair that gays could marry... for reasons.

It is hard to think of a good argument against gay marriage; most of the "people" in National Review's symposium cited polygamy as the motivating factor in their advocacy against it.

The slippery slope extends far further than that. I was forced by my wife Lynne to watch a BBC series called Poldark in which a man marries his servant. I am unsure whether or not this is historically accurate — I know the Downton Abbey sex tape girl made it with her driver, but I thought that was a bit of a grey area. It isn't as if he was cleaning her toilet, after all.

To be fair, she was a fantastic maid.

I composed an elaborate Modest Proposal parody concerning how no one should be allowed to marry their servant, but I replaced it with the impassioned broadside that follows. You can thank me later.

The title character of Ross Poldark (Aiden Turner) fucks his maid exactly once, although on another very symbolic occasion she baked him an apple pie. After an intense night that the producers of Poldark show alarmingly little of, the ginger maid Demelza (Eleanor Tomlimson) resolves to wander away from the Poldark estate, which looks something like a penis:

After you lose a war to Americans, you build homes like this as emotional shelter I guess.

I recently received a few scandalous electronic mails suggesting that I am obsessed with seeing penises where they are not. One even threatened that if I expressed regret at never seeing the Mountain's member one more time he would traitorously start reading the wretched Game of Thrones recaps on some other website. I wrote him back, saying, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" and included a gif of Catelyn Stark being murdered.

In some ways Poldark is basically a Cateyln Stark prequel, which should horrify every thinking person.

You can't help but see penises on Poldark, even if they are not veiny or fleshy. The main character lives in a penis, and he has a scar running from his left eye to his jaw that looks like a long, stringy phallus. Turner's acting is a little overdone, and his main quality is an overwhelming handsomeness. He works very hard nonetheless, and he does take his shirt off an awful lot to make up for the lack of visible genitals. Instead of bidding farewell to Demelza, Ross Poldark decides to make her his wife.

The only thing missing from Poldark is any individual of color, and any homosexual. Downton Abbey got us used to expecting extensive gay storylines full of unrequited love and sexually transmitted diseases in our British period dramas. Poldark has none of that — the National Review crowd can enjoy it as good Christians enjoy the Bible and, apparently, denying citizens equal protection under the law.

None of these people can marry.

One article I read from a guy named Rod Dreher was particularly pernicious, and deserves special mention. Christians don't like being called hateful, he explained, without explaining why he does not want gays to be able to commit to one another for life. Given the decision, he went on to say, it is now Christians who are the righteous minority. He seemed to take a certain disturbed pleasure in this. Naturally he finished his column with the most inane sentence in all of op-ed dom: We live in interesting times.

The wedding was sold to US Weekly for six million shillings.

After Poldark marries his servant, he immediately puts a bun in her oven. She and the baby get sick from an illness that is going around Poldark's copper mine. It is never cleared up why he can't get a more honest occupation, like that of columnist for the Dallas Morning News, with which to provide for his family. Instead he subjects the working class of his region to his penis manor, his slighter-higher but still pretty low wages, and the diseases of the copper underground, the one he inherited from his now-deceased father.

Digging in the earth himself is beneath his own dignity. As a veteran of the American War of Independence, he is finished doing the dirty work, even if it is his own dirty work. Instead his child is the one who suffers, perishing from the contagion. This is irony, only semi-tragic and not humorous. Gay marriage should have been a tremendous victory for conservatives who championed the importance of the family unit as the standard grouping of civilization. Instead they made a mess of things.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. His conscience is massive at this point, and expanding every day. He grows larger in our appreciation of him. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

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