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Real Answers™
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Copyright: © 2010 Tom Flannery
640 words

"MAD" MEL'S LETHAL MOUTH

By: Tom Flannery

Well, at least he didn’t blame the Jews this time.

In excerpts from taped phone conversations released in recent days, we hear Mel Gibson calling his ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva every filthy name imaginable, and threatening to kill her and bury her in a rose garden.

Gibson has gone, in a relatively short period of time, from movie hero for his roles in the “Mad Max” and “Lethal Weapons” movies, to someone routinely described as “Mad” Mel with a “lethal weapon” of a mouth.

The question that some have asked is, how can the same man who co-wrote, produced, directed and personally financed a glorious film like “The Passion of the Christ” be the same one heard on these tapes?

In particular, Joy Behar is in a tizzy because many Christians seem to be standing by Gibson.  She confronted actor Stephen Baldwin, an outspoken Christian, on her talk show about it.  Baldwin acknowledged that “there’s obviously something wrong with [Gibson],” but added that Christians are called to show him love and help get him on the right path if possible.

He suggested that the proper response should be to ask:  “What do we do to help him?”

Behar only became more furious at that point, and even more so when Baldwin had the temerity to point out that Behar has been less than charitable when dealing with or talking about Christians.  Yet, as he also noted, no one is applying the standard to her that she wants applied to Gibson.  That really sent the vituperative Behar over the edge, so she cut Baldwin off and told him to “go back on your meds.”

What a lovely lady.

This is yet another example of the selective outrage of liberals.  For instance, when the child rapist Roman Polanski was taken into custody recently, a slew of celebrities rushed to his defense — signing petitions, making public statements, going all out to save the pedophile from long-delayed justice.

Then there are all those on the left who have virulently attacked Sarah Palin’s children, including the vile rumors spread about her Down Syndrome child Trig.  It takes a particular type of venality to use a special-needs infant as a target of attack for political gain, so where was all the outrage while that was happening?  Those vile rumors were greeted by the same yawns as were generated last week when left-wing comedian Kathy Griffin, the darling of CNN, called Scott Brown’s young daughters “prostitutes.”

Writing about the Gibson audiotapes in a piece posted on Big Hollywood, the terrific novelist Andrew Klavan explains that our “fascination with celebrity — the fascination with artists above and beyond the works they create — is, in effect, the opposite of wisdom.  It is honoring the fool whom God inspired rather than engaging with the wisdom of the art he was inspired to make.”

Many of us would never think of using the kind of racist language that Gibson does in this conversation.  Nor would we accuse Jews of being responsible for starting all of the world’s wars, as Gibson did during his DUI arrest in 2006.  But that doesn’t mean any of us are guiltless.

While denouncing Gibson’s tirade as “disgusting stuff,” Klavan also pointed out in his piece:  “We’ve all got problems, every one of us, and we all do and say things that degrade us and that we regret.”

As the Bible tells us, the human heart is “deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9).

Christians like Klavan and Baldwin understand the fallen nature of man, so they aren’t shocked when any man — even the maker of “The Passion” — lashes out from the depths of his fallenness.  That doesn’t justify or even excuse his repulsive behavior, but it does help put it into perspective.

They know that Mel Gibson is no hero.  He’s just like the rest of us.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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