Thursday, June 26, 2008

Mary and Adam: Morning and Afternoon

The Hallmark Channel has four Little House on the Prairie episodes each day, two in the morning, and two in the afternoon. In the two morning ones today, Mary loses her sight and meets her future husband, Adam, who also is blind. In the two afternoon ones, Adam regains his sight. How's that for a coincidence?

Mary is sad that Adam regains his sight. She fears that she'll be a burden to him and that he'll leave her behind for his sighted friends. On a previous episode, there was hope that Mary would get her sight back, and Adam was upset for the same reasons (he was still blind at the time). Maybe Adam should've been more sensitive to Mary once he got his sight back, since he once felt the same way that Mary did.

There's one part that has always puzzled me. On the one in which Adam gets his sight back, he takes a series of tests to become a lawyer. But he gets sick and misses a few of them, and he is required to wait a year before he can take them again. Mary goes to the professor and calls such a rule "unfair." "If a law is unjust, does the court have the power to annul it?" she asks. "The court has such power," the professor responds.

Does it? I mean, I know that the Supreme Court can annul laws that violate the Constitution. But can it get rid of laws on the sole basis that it deems them unfair? Talk about judicial activism and legislating from the bench!