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I’ve not seen The Blind Side, for which I understand Sandra Bullock received an Academy Reward. The advertising for the movie emphasized that it was a Heartwarming Tale of Human Perseverance, and I hate that shit on principle.

Beyond that it seemed to be intended as popular entertainment designed to make white people feel better about themselves qua white people, something that’s never an especially edifying spectacle, and indeed a notoriously vulgar cliche. Don’t get me wrong; many of my best friends (and immediate family and ahem myself) are white, and they are quite lovely folks when they haven’t had too much whiskey, which is often. Sometimes. Occasionally. What I’m saying about The Blind Side, I mean, is that while it’s entirely possible that this review is wrong and I’ll think otherwise after I watch it, I calculate the odds of that being the case as about as low as me ever bothering to rent The Blind Side to find out, which I will never do, as the best case scenario is the film is a Heartwarming Tale of Human Perseverance, and life’s too damn short, you know?

But I will anyhow draw your attention to this nonsense from noted cretin Ben Shapiro over at Townhall, a specimen who doesn’t yet qualify as a twerp because his balls are as yet non-descended. Why am I drawing your attention to this garbage? Because you’ve probably done something bad lately and deserve it.

On Sunday night, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress at the 82nd Academy Awards for her portrayal of gun-toting Republican Leigh Anne Tuohy in “The Blind Side”….

Leave it to the gals on “The View” to tear apart this heartwarming story. Vanessa Williams, sitting in for Whoopi Goldberg, trashed the film, even though she’d never seen it. Williams said: “It brings up a theme for black folks of ‘OK, here’s another white family that has saved the day.’ Another black story that has to have a white person come in and lift them up. And I’m not saying it’s not true and it didn’t happen, it’s one of those ‘do I really want to save the same theme again?’” Joy Behar, the ugly liberal harridan who thinks genital jokes demonstrate extraordinary wit, quickly sided with Williams.

Shapiro is going to soon inform us that It Is Liberals Are the Real Racists, etc. As is usual for this genre, though, he forgets for the moment that he needs to hide the misogyny: gals? Harridan? And what’s wrong with genital jokes (see above)? Are they worse than, say, poop jokes? Ben? “An Inconvenient Truth is perhaps the worst thing ever put on film; it’s as though Satan had explosive diarrhea on camera, and then the diarrhea talked at you for two hours.” Well, Ben is a youngster — in Freudian terms, he’s still at the backdoor stage developmentally, and hasn’t yet discovered the joys of his wee wee.

But to the point:

Somehow liberals get away with detritus like this on a regular basis. If someone voiced moral doubt about a movie depicting a black family adopting a white child, they’d be raked over the coals — and rightfully so. Transracial adoption should be seen as the greatest hallmark of the tremendous racial acceptance that now dominates our culture. But extreme liberals — and black extreme liberals in particular — can get away with bashing transracial adoption because they rely on the lexicon of political correctness, which suggests that “cultural autonomy” is threatened by such adoptions.

Of course, Williams wasn’t talking about interracial adoption, she was talking about movie cliches. Like the one that does not exist about a black family adopting a white child, which has appeared over and over, meaning never, in no major movies or TV shows anyone can easily remember. Or, mostly, in real life, either, and when it does, there are, you know, issues.

Because, as it emerges, just-so heartwarming stories about the realities of race in America are even less persuasive in wingnut apologias than they are in big budget Hollywood productions.

photo: kamper vision via Flickr

So once again, here we are with the bigotry of the Catholic Church on display, this time coming to us from Denver, CO.

A few days ago, I first noticed the stories on how the Archdiocese of Denver had banned a child from re-enrolling at one of their schools because the parents were lesbians. Of course, the Archdiocese is defending the decision:

“The Church does not claim that people with a homosexual orientation are ‘bad,’ or that their children are less loved by God,” wrote Archbishop Charles J. Chaput in an article to be published in Thursday’s edition of the Denver Catholic Register.

It appears to me, that the Archdiocese has taken to heart the admonition from Exodus 20:5-6 :

You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand {generations} of those who love me and keep my commandments.

But somehow, it seems the folks at the Archdiocese making this decision missed the admonitions from Jesus in Matthew 19:14:

Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.”

Apparently, the Archdiocese (like many of the fundamentalist “Christians” organizations) gives far more credence to the Old Testament rather than the New Testament, even though they all profess their love for Jesus and his teachings.

My question for them is do they really want to take this path? Especially given the concurrent reports over the last couple of weeks about the Vatican Choir? Combined with allegations of physical and sexual abuse in a choir run by the Pope’s brother?

Tags: Bigotry, Catholic Church, Christianity, religious intolerance