There are a lot of things that look terrible about the trailer for Dustin Lance Black’s new movie, Virginia:

But I think I’m most irritated by the whole pious-Mormon-sheriff-who’s-cheating-on-his-wife-so-he-can-be-a-submissive schtick. It’s amazing how often pop culture goes to the adultery well, whether it’s to demonstrate that a social conservative is a hypocrite; to show that an upstanding man has a dark side as was the case in Ides of March; or to reinforce the idea that an already venal person is even more evil than we already knew.

I’ve been watching Damages as part of work on a larger piece, and it’s very interesting in the first season how the show decides to reinforce that Arthur Frobisher, a billionaire who trashed his company’s stock value to make a profit and raided his employees’ pension fund, is a bad guy by having him sleep with hookers while he’s married and do some cocaine after his wife decides to divorce him. There was something just incredibly generic about the sequences (though it is particularly poignant to me to see Ted Danson have sad desperate car hooker sex) and the way they were meant to indicate to us that he was a Bad, Bad Man. Especially because there are much more powerful ways to impart the same lesson. His casual manipulation of his mole among the client advocates, and the way he treats his wife, particularly the scene where he swings the good-luck putter she made sure he had as his good luck charm into her windshield in a futile, scary attempt to prevent her from leaving him, are much more directly relevant to explaining Frobisher’s hunger for control.

I get that choreographing morally-dubious-looking sex scenes, or talking about adultery, is a really easy thing to do cinematically. But it’s really boring, and it often doesn’t get at what actually is important about these figures. Being personally irresponsible and selfish isn’t actually always the same impulse as reshaping the world to suit your needs. And what’s important about philandering politicians or corporate tycoons is less their personal behavior and the way it impacts their families than the policies they implement and the decisions that they make that affect the rest of us.

When Perry v. Schwarzenegger (which became Perry v. Brown), the legal case challenging California’s Proposition 8 ballot initiative which banned marriage equality, went to trial, the proceedings, like the proceedings in many American courtrooms, weren’t broadcast. It’s a case that would have been of interest to thousands, if not more, Americans who had to rely on news reports of the case. That may have been fortunate for proponents of Prop 8, who spent a considerable amount of tangling themselves in some truly linguistically and logically hilarious knots. But it was still a lost opportunity.

Fortunately, playwright and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black attended a considerable amount of the trial, and adapted transcripts of it into 8. I’d heard excerpts of the play, which is both insightful and funny before, but a group of celebrities did a reading of it over the weekend, and it’s even better. And it’s a great example of how art can open up closed government proceedings and amplify them to a much wider audience than they might have found in the first place. Artists don’t always have to be facilitators of the messages and work preassigned them by people who work full-time in politics. They can break information out, and they can frame the message themselves.

And thanks to YouTube, you can enjoy that reading—and that amplification—yourself:

If you’ve ever doubted that popular culture influences public opinion and public policy, it’s worth reading today’s decision by Judge Reinhardt striking down Proposition 8, California’s equal marriage rights ban. In it, Reinhardt looks at popular culture across time to trace the particular meaning that marriage has for us, and to explain why the alternatives states have tried to offer gay couples simply aren’t as resonant or powerful to us:

We are excited to see someone ask, “Will you marry me?”, whether on bended knee in a restaurant or in text splashed across a stadium Jumbotron. Certainly it would not have the same effect to see “Will you enter into a registered domestic partnership with me?”. Groucho Marx’s one-liner, “Marriage is a wonderful institution…but who wants to live in an institution?” would lack its punch if the word ‘marriage’ were replaced with the alternative phrase. So too with Shakespeare’s “A young man married is a man that’s marr’d,” Lincoln’s “Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory,” and Sinatra’s “A man doesn’t know what happiness is until he’s married. By then it’s too late.” We see tropes like “marrying for love” versus “marrying for money” played out again and again in our films and literature because of the recognized importance and permanence of the marriage relationship. Had Marilyn Monroe’s film been called How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire, it would not have conveyed the same meaning as did her famous movie, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different. The name ‘marriage’ signifies the unique recognition that society gives to harmonious, loyal, enduring, and intimate relationships.

The long-established tropes of popular culture, in other words, help shape our special understanding of marriage. And the weight and persistence of those tropes is part of the reason that creating alternatives to marriage doesn’t work: they don’t carry the same legal rights and responsibilities, and they don’t have the same cultural heft, and can’t for a very, very long time. Representation in culture, in other words, affects the way people and institutions are represented and protected in reality.

I also think it’s worth noting that Proposition 8 prompted a vigorous cultural response as well as a legal one. The No H8 campaign acquired such cachet that participation became near-mandatory in Hollywood, posing for it became a plot point on reality shows, and even Cindy McCain hopped on board in 2010, a clear case of cultural cachet trumping party loyalty. Milk, the Academy Award-winning biopic of slain City Supervisor Harvey Milk was released in the Castro to rally support against Proposition 8, a development that likely contributed to Sean Penn’s Best Actor victory in the role, and Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black followed up that movie with 8, a play about the legal challenge to the law that’s become a key tool in celebrity marriage quality fundraisers.

And I think it’s no surprise in the post-Proposition 8 era, we’ve seen an explosion of pop culture depictions of gay California couples, whether it’s Mitch and Cam on Modern Family, to Jules and Nic in The Kids are All Right, to Brady and Cheeks on webseries Husbands. These characters deserve the right to marry because they’re citizens who ought to be entitled to the rights and responsibilities available to their straight counterparts. But these portrayals are also about establishing gay couples as part of a rich comedic and dramatic tradition of flawed people in the process of building more perfect unions.