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Nazi family values
Chewing the fat with a white-supremacist mom and her 6-year-old daughter at an Idaho barbecue.
By Amy Benfer
[07/15/99]

Time For One Thing
Silence
Quality time may be overrated -- unless it's with yourself.
By Karen Grigsby Bates
[07/13/99]

Stay-home economics
One mom crunches the numbers on the assumption that quitting work is cheaper than paying for life as a working parent.
By Phaedra Hise
[07/13/99]

You can halve it all
You can get your husband to do his share if you demand it -- or threaten divorce.
By Jennifer Bingham Hull
[07/12/99]

All you need is love -- and a marriage license
If Jesse Helms has his way, new legislation could limit international adoptions for everyone but married straight couples.
By Joan Oleck
[07/09/99]

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Gospel Films Inc., which apparently makes religious-cum-educational tapes for "teens at risk," has released a 32-minute blockbuster soon to be distributed to a prison or school near you. "The Choice is Yours -- With David Berkowitz" is a low-tech display of harried Christian propaganda and a lengthy interview with America's original postal-worker-turned-psychopath, "Son of Sam" serial killer David Berkowitz, who has loudly undergone a vast born-again Christian conversion while serving a life sentence without possibility of parole in the maximum-security Sullivan Correctional Facility.

Narrator/interviewer Bill Meyers, a middle-aged Jay Leno-type guy in an elastic-waisted leather jacket and jeans, seethes with reasonableness and sincerity, seems to want to really communicate with today's kids about the choices they make and isn't afraid to use almost "harsh" teen language to do it. "It's a funny thing about adolescence -- we start questioning everything. For some, our parents suddenly become cruel dictators, or mutant morons," he says with a shrug. He seems to be able to look through the TV screen and see us, the troubled teen audience, nodding with approval and thinking to ourselves, "Hey, this guy is speaking our lingo. We relate." Meyers then introduces a visual metaphor for a "bad choice" by spreading two small, black, foam tubes into a V on the sand at the beach. At first, the bad decision is only a few degrees off from the good decision. Get it?

The video then paints a portrait of David Berkowitz as a nerdy, fat kid and attributes his wholesale slide off the deep end to "drugs and drinking," "wanting to fit in" and "peer pressure" to be "cool." Berkowitz is now a fat, ranty, used-car-salesman type of 47-year-old Bronx guy who thumbs obsessively through a red plastic Bible and proclaims that he was "a real jerk" back during his murder spree.

About half of the film is interviews with hapless inner-city teen ex-thugs for Christ, who have renounced prostitution, drug addiction and gang-banging in favor of walking through the park in the sunshine, carrying Bibles and wearing big, glassy-eyed smiles on their faces.

"On the street, I ended up selling myself for sometimes just a hamburger," says one raspy-voiced girl with dyed red hair and a wandering eye.

One sobby teenage girl discusses the awful "physical and emotional scars" she received from getting an abortion, focusing primarily on the fact that she now considers this "murder" a horrible decision she'll now have to live with forever. The film, true to its form, cuts to a shot of a mangled fetus.

Another boy discusses with remorse how he "afflicted peer pressure on others" and contracted a venereal disease at 15 because he didn't wait to be married to have sex. "I had so many women at the time, I didn't even know who I got it from."

"Violence doesn't really birth anything," says another young man, wisely.

The video paints jail as a dark and despairing, sin-filled place you really don't want to go: "In the county jails," says a teen ex-junkie, paling with trepidation, "especially the female county jails, homosexuality is, like, a big thing." Horrors!

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