When I posted on the weekend about Mel Gibson’s latest bigoted rants (he has a long history of these), I noted that blogsites were indicating that a second installment of Gibson’s enraged threats against Oksana Grigorieva, the mother of his last child, was soon to be released.
The tapes are now circulating. And they’re vile.
In this installment, Gibson threatens physical violence against Grigorieva, and screams at her,
You have no f-----g soul. And my soul is screaming because you don't have one to join mine!
So why pay any attention to this? On the one hand, Gibson is a frail human being just as I am, capable of sin, susceptible to falling apart like anyone else. It seems clear that his diffuse rage is fueled, in part, by addiction problems that deserve our compassion. And I do pity him and wish for his healing. I pray for him, in fact.
But on the other hand, I think it’s important to follow the story of Gibson’s inevitable (as my previous posting notes, one can predict a descent into self-destructive violence among men who spend their lifetimes bashing women and gay men with impunity, taunting minority groups, etc.) spiral downwards for the following reasons:
1. Gibson’s a major pop-cultural figure, and as such, he exercises tremendous influence on the thinking of people around the world. Far more influence than popes do, or tired old washed up theologians, or teachers in classrooms, or writers.
2. As a major pop-cultural icon, Gibson has made it his business to promote himself and his ideas as a model of Catholic thinking and piety.
3. He has self-consciously and deliberately linked his form of Catholicism to bigotry against gays, Jews, people of color, women, etc. In doing so, he has linked such bigotry, in the popular mind, to Catholicism itself.
4. He has been given a forum in which to present himself and his "old-fashioned" Latin-rite schismatic Catholicism as models for the rest of us by the major Catholic television network in the U.S., the network that is the U.S. bishops’ “official” broadcasting network—EWTN.
5. This leaves many of us who are Catholic with a problem: when someone with the influence of Mel Gibson is given such an influential forum from which to promote his version of Catholicism (with all its attached bigotries) as Catholicism itself, how do we respond? How do those of us who are appalled at the links between Catholicism and anti-Semitism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia respond?
My answer: we do so by speaking out. Through blogs and other forums at which questions about Gibson’s Catholicism and the influence of that Catholicism are being raised.
If we don’t speak out, if we don’t criticize and push back, then we are tacitly telling the world that Gibson speaks for all of us. And when we remain silent in the face of evil and evil then does that it always does—attacks one more innocent person—we become complicit in the actions of evil.
