Saturday, October 3, 2009

The Moral Idiocy of Hollywood


Much has already been said about the arrest of well known director Roman Polanski. If there was any doubt about the radical chasm that exists between liberal Hollywood and the rest of America, the Polanski ordeal removes it. It is Whoopi Goldberg saying on The View that Polanski drugging, raping, and sodomizing a 13 year-old girl "is not rape, rape." It is the likes of Woody Allen, Debra Winger, Martin Scorcese, and Michael Mann signing a statement condemning Polanski's arrest.

Al Mohler offers appropriate commentary:



Moral hypocrisy is an ugly thing, regardless of its source. Hypocrisy is a moral trap of constant threat -- the price of holding any moral standards at all. To hold to the truth of moral judgment and then to allow for the transgression of that moral judgment is hypocrisy in its essence. The only total escape from the threat of hypocrisy is to forfeit any claim to moral standards at all.

Hypocrisy is found in ample supply among both conservatives and liberals. The conservative variant seems most evident when political or religious leaders are found guilty of transgressing the very principles they preach. The hypocrisy spreads in both extent and significance when those who claim to be conservatives attempting to conserve moral wisdom excuse those who flaunt their personal disregard for that wisdom.

The liberal variant seems most evident when, for example, moral relativists all of the sudden discover moral scruples. It turns out that even postmodern relativists and the children of the 1960s do believe in moral principles after all. Yet, the cultural left has always found sexual morality most difficult to define or defend.

The other liberal variant that so often appears is the argument that artists or celebrities or academics are above the morality to which the rest of us are accountable. In the end, the children of the sexual revolution have gravitated toward a sexual morality that boils down to consent. In its essence, this sexual morality holds that anything consenting individuals do with each other sexually is beyond moral censure. And anything means anything. An ethic of consent is all that remains after the ethic of moral rules is discarded in the name of liberation...


[Harvey] Weinstein defended Hollywood's defense of Polanski, referring to his sex with a 13-yer-old girl as a "so-called crime" and telling The Los Angeles Times: "Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion . . . We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe." In other words, our morality is superior to you un-artistic types with your moral scruples about sex with children.

Read the entire article HERE.

3 comments:

threegirldad said...

(language and content warning)

Mark Steyn in National Review:

"Whoopi Goldberg offered a practical defense — that what Polanski did was not 'rape-rape,' a distinction she left imprecisely delineated. Which may leave you with the vague impression that this was one of those deals where you’re in a bar and the gal says to you she’s in tenth grade and you find out afterwards she’s only in seventh. Hey, we’ve all been there, right? But in this particular instance Roman Polanski knew she was 13 years old and, when she declined his entreaties, drugged her with champagne and a Quaalude and then sodomized her. Twice. Which, even on the Whoopi scale, sounds less like rape, or even rape-rape, and more like rape-rape-rape-rape."

More here.

HT: Dan Phillips

Todd Pruitt said...

Love Mark Steyn!

Mark W. said...

From the New Republic blog:
Today, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch also added their names to those of sixty-odd other cinematic luminaries who've signed a petition calling for Polanski's immediate release. But the award for complete lack of self-awareness has to go to another new signee who placed his moral capital in such matters on the table today as well: Woody Allen.