Veteran reporter Sharon Waxman knew she’d found a new low. Reporting from the Toronto Film Festival, she revealed the viewpoint of director Nick Cassavetes, which she summarized in a headline: “Who Gives a Damn? Love Who You Want.” The topic was incest.
Hollywood’s march to tear down – to obliterate, really -- every boundary of sexual decency should compel even the harshest accusers of social conservatives like Rick Santorum to apologize profusely. They were wrong to mock conservatives for warning of the extremes, as we’re lurching so quickly and easily into the darkest “love who you want” extremes of the Lifestyle Left.
Cassavetes is selling his film “Yellow,” which stars his ex-wife Heather Wahlquist as a beautiful woman addicted to pain pills. She travels back home to Oklahoma after being expelled from her teaching job in Los Angeles for “having broom closet sex on Parent Night.” On her way home, she stops to visit her brother in prison. It results in a incest scene that we’re told is “tender and affecting and signals no judgment of the relationship.”
Then he arrived at what became the headline of the article: “I’m not saying this is an absolute, but in a way, if you’re not having kids – Who gives a damn? Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister, it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody, except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.”
In a very real sense, he’s right. This is where the slippery slope leads. Cassavetes said he wanted to portray a modern woman who is, in his words, “a rock star” and “a mess.” He wanted “an exaggerated version of a girl who came from a place where different things are acceptable.” In reality, he wanted a beautiful woman that viewers would find sympathetic, and then throw this shocking, “tender” incest scene in their face.
Don’t think critics won’t like it. A reviewer on Indiewire called this movie “officially the most refreshing breath of air” at the Toronto film festival. “So far there is no news on distribution or when this thing is coming out, but as soon as it does, go out, don’t take it too seriously and have a little fun with it.”
Don’t take the incest scene too seriously? Have fun with it? What – chuckle?
Incest isn’t the only grave sin that’s being promoted by the cultural revolutionaries. Last fall, the major gossip website Gawker.com strongly attacked the social site Reddit for having a “Jailbait” subsection displaying sexualized images of girls of junior-high age for “catering to pedophiles.” So what is Gawker doing now? Catering to pedophiles.
This juggernaut website published an article on September 7 titled “Born This Way: Sympathy and Science for Those Who Want to Have Sex with Children.” The writer Cord Jefferson cited “a growing number of researchers, many of them out of Canada, whose work suggests that pedophilia is an illness deserving of the public's sympathy the way any brain disorder is. Some of the scientists say pedophilia is a sexual orientation, meaning that it's unchangeable, regardless of how much jail time or beatings or therapy someone is dealt.”
Where are the national media outlets who are still pounding their anvils on the front pages and talk-TV segments against the Catholic Church and their struggles with pedophilia? Nowhere to be found.
Jefferson argued “if pedophilia is a sexual orientation, that also means it's futile to send pedophiles to prison in an effort to alter their attractions. Doing so is akin to sending a homosexual child off to a religious-based institution that claims it can ‘pray the gay away.’”
This jaw-dropping article concluded that the weakest in our society – he listed blacks, women, Latinos, and gays – “are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they're also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children. One imagines that if Jesus ever came to Earth, he'd embrace the poor, the blind, the lepers, and, yes, the pedophiles.”
Jesus would embrace every sinner...who is ashamed of his sin. Shame and judgment have been banished in most of our pop culture.
Perhaps Gawker will next try and convince Nick Cassavetes to make his next daring indie film with “tender and affecting” scenes of pedophilia which “signal no judgment.” There are so many lows, and so little time.
