Fun with double standards

I watched the Oscars last night. Sean Penn is a strong adherent to the value of double-standards. He admonished those who would, for religious reasons, vote their conscience, and specifically mentioned the word "shame". As in: they should be ashamed for voting the way they did. If I understand him correctly, he has no problem with practicing religious intolerance in his quest for tolerance of a non-traditional definition of marriage.

The double-double (double-squared?) standard comes in when one takes note of the fact that Penn made friends last year with the dictator of Venezuela, a country which denies many basic human rights to its citizens, including homosexuals. If memory serves correctly, Penn also spent some time in Iran not too long ago.

Sean, it's a lot more safe to be out of the closet in California than in Iran or Venezuela. I'm puzzled why you choose to spend time in two nations which offer much more oppression, and much less freedom, than we have here in the US, if freedom is so important to you. Like my socks in my bachelor days, your actions and words simply do not match.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Well if you're a relativist, then there's no such thing as standards anyway. The only standard is "convenience"... They say "I'll do whatever I want and use rhetoric to support it". I'm convinced that those who use the word "tolerance" these days are using a different dictionary. To quote Enigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

February 23, 2009 at 3:30 PM

Saying goodbye to one set of twins, and hello to another

"It's been ten whole years already? Wow! Hard to believe." Many a father will say something like that while shaking his head in disbelief, when his oldest approaches the 10th birthday. It's a milestone, not just for the kid, but for the parents. It's a head-shaker because I am reminded that on that day, 10 years ago, my life changed forever. In some ways, it has passed very quickly. In other ways, it seems like it's been every bit of ten years. There are two distinct things, though, about the ten-year anniversary of my dadhood. The first is that I became a father of not one, but two little bundles of joy that Tuesday morning. Abby was born at 8:48, followed by her brother Jacob at 8:50. The second is that their birth marked some rare joy in the midst of the darkest day in our nation's history. As my wife was in labor, a nurse came in and told us that an airplane had crashed into a skyscraper in New York. I turned on the labor room...

Embarrassing video clip--John Cougar

I recently stumbled across some Youtube gold: a live performance by John Mellencamp when he was Johnny Cougar. He appears to be have been about 23, and he's singing "Ain't even Done With The Night", in front of a fairly unresponsive crowd with Bobby Bare (?!) in the front seat. Cougar/Mellencamp is dressed in a nerdy sweater and generally bears no resemblance to the singer as we knew him just 5 years later. He looks a lot more like Potsie from Happy Days than the guy who sang "Pink Houses". Certainly, there is no way to watch this and make a connection to the guy whose song "This is Our Country" beat us to death by overuse in pickup truck commercials. But the real entertainment value from this clip comes from the guys behind Cougar. In hot-pink tuxedos, there are 5 Pips-like backup dancers/singers who don't sing, but clap their hands real well. They essentially spend the entire song performing cheerleader dance routines not unlike those ...

The Two Christmases

As I walked through the front door of the Post Office to make my stamp purchase, I was faced with a choice. On my left was a vending machine, and to my right was the customer service desk, where I could make the purchase from actual human beings. Because there was no line at the moment, I chose the human interaction. I strolled up to the middle-aged, slightly balding postal employee, read that his name was "Rex", and I asked for two books of stamps. As it was mid-December, Rex asked me "would you like Christmas stamps, or...". Once I realized he wasn't about to complete the sentence, I looked down and saw that he was holding some very un-Christmas-like stamps bearing images of the Liberty Bell and the word "Forever." Knowing that my wife had planned to mail several Christmas cards, I told him "One of each." To my surprise, the decision-making did not stop there. Rex hit me with a follow-up: he held up two types of stamps: one had a pi...

Middletree

Search This Blog