The sitcom Modern Family features three families to promote a political message straight out of a Pleasant Valley delusion.  The first family is natural and intact, with three children.  The second is blended and culturally mixed, with a missing father and two children many years apart.  The third family comprises two homosexual men with a four-year-old Asian adopted daughter.

The June 2 episode of Modern Family could have been a documentary about the psychological advantages of the intact natural family.  In that family, the father and daughter are competing in a humorous way about their overuse of technology.  The ideal power-balancing between the two parents and the mutually respectful generations is portrayed as the daughter inevitably outwits her father.  In the same episode, the unigender couple with their adopted daughter are of course depicted as loving and lovable idealists.  But their adopted daughter is carried throughout the show and exhibits clearly abnormal behavior that nobody notices.  A creative team of Austen, Tolstoy, and Dickens couldn't make these families seem equally sane and plausible.

Here's a truism for family life: the craziest person is the one with the most power.  The blended family in Modern Family is dominated by the much younger wife, an endlessly blaring red mouth behind several feet of exposed cleavage.  She “out-Charos” Charo every time she opens her boca.  Her character stopped being funny with Ricky Ricardo.  An indication of her psychopathogenic power is that her husband and his stepson are hiding in the garage in fear of her.  They suspect her of killing a dog, which is an indicator of psychological abuse in a family.

But it is the Asian adopted daughter that is a cause for concern.  This child rarely is seen walking, playing, speaking, or smiling.  Her expression is blank except for subtle anxiety.  She avoids eye contact or any response to the actor who is clutching her.  This sitcom had better end before she gets too big to pass back and forth like a stuffed toy, because if her feet were allowed to touch the floor, she looks like she would bolt from the studio.

Ironically, the 6/2 storyline involves a visit from the mother of the natural family’s husband.  They seem to adore each other and exchange much love.  Of course, it is this love between mother and child, so central to the man, that the adopted little girl will never have.  Despite the show’s efforts to push the homosexual alternative, this child is clearly disadvantaged compared to the girls in the family based on man-woman marriage.  It is hard to imagine how this child could grow up to be a happy wife and mother.

A recent study by Mark Regnerus suggests that children of same-sex parents are seriously disadvantaged throughout life.  His conclusions have triggered an uproar by supporters of same-sex parenting.  But even the propagandistic Modern Family can’t disguise the disadvantages for children of same-sex parents.