Here's a trivia trick question that will throw future film and TV buffs for a loop: Growing Pains is a) the name of a popular 80s sitcom about an affluent family in Huntington, New York, or b) the documentary that actor/Old Testament fanboy Kirk Cameron's gay children make about growing up under relentless pressure from their homophobic father to stay in the closet?

At one point during this disheartening interview, Piers Morgan bluntly asks Cameron to explain what he believes about gay marriage, and Cameron answers by saying that marriage is "almost as old as dirt," that it was created in the Garden (that would be the Edenic garden and not that little solarium in the background of the kitchen set on Growing Pains), and that for reasons of its venerable old age, he would never attempt to redefine it.

As it turns out, the Piers Morgan interview dovetails nicely with a little polemic — charmingly titled "We Cannot Afford to Indulge this Madness" — that appeared in the Telegraph yesterday, in which Britain's most senior Jacobite Catholic, Cardinal Keith O'Hara, rails against his government's move to consider permitting gay marriage in England and Wales, suggesting that it would be completely crazy, if not outright impossible, to redefine "marriage," a word that has meant only one thing since antediluvian times. He writes,

But can we simply redefine terms at a whim? Can a word whose meaning has been clearly understood in every society throughout history suddenly be changed to mean something else?

That's right — because words, once they're written down, only mean one thing forever and ever. With so many examples to choose from of, say, Greek and Latin words that have most definitely mutated over the thousands of years they've had to experiment with different languages, one seems especially instructive in this instance: dogma, a Greek word that used to merely mean an opinion, or, literally, "that which one thinks is true," and not, as it seems to mean to today's religious nutjobs, a rigid code permitting the oppression and harassment of those with whom one disagrees. It might also bear mentioning that, while Cameron seems to think that homosexuality is "ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization," the civilization that he's a part of was conceived by a bunch of dudes who liked dudes, probably right after a symposium and right before a blowjob contest.

We cannot afford to indulge this madness [Telegraph]

[via Buzzfeed]