It is surely a symptom of a hopelessly decadent culture that a man in his forties, Roman Polanski, can drug a thirteen year-old girl, anally rape her as she pleads with him to stop, admit to the crime, flee the country, and then have much of Hollywood and even some feminists protest his arrest and extradition back to the U.S. to be held accountable for his crime.
Joan Z. Shore writes at HuffPo that she's outraged at the Swiss for arresting Polanski who, she tells us, is really very charming:
The 13-year old model "seduced" by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies. The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence.
I met Polanski shortly after he fled America and was filming Tess in Normandy. I was working in the CBS News bureau in Paris, and I accompanied Mike Wallace for a Sixty Minutes interview with Polanski on the set. Mike thought he would be meeting the devil incarnate, but was utterly charmed by Roman's sobriety and intelligence.
And this from a co-founder of Women Overseas for Equality. You've come a long way, baby.
The poor, maligned Mr. Polanski in a 1979 interview reflected on his crime and demonstrated the depth of his remorse by expressing his feelings about young girls. It's not pretty.
If you check the link just imagine that Polanski were not a celebrated filmmaker but rather a Catholic priest or even worse, a Republican. Do you think there'd be anyone in Hollywood not in favor of hanging the guy from the nearest tree? Why should this man get sympathy just because he makes movies?
One might be forgiven for thinking that the deep concern for the status of women in this country is, for at least some of those foremost among women's advocates, merely a pose struck by phonies who wish to be seen holding fashionable opinions. There's no conviction in their high-minded paens to women's rights and women's equality. This was clear during the nineties when women's groups which had flayed Clarence Thomas for having allegedly made an off-color remark in the presence of the delicate and sensitive Anita Hill completely ignored the credible allegations of rape and sexual abuse made by several women against President Clinton.
Now, because the rapist is one of their own, an artist of great talent, they think he should be permitted his perversions. These people give a whole new meaning to the term "double standard."
RLC