Reply #37: It's called art

[Jack Rabbit]

Disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie.

Whether you like it or not, bigots are real people. If you doubt that, I present as Exhibit A the aforementioned Ms. Coulter.

Ms. Coulter is particularly screwy in that not only does she hate gays, she uses the epithet faggot inappropriately in order to conflate homosexuality with leading Democrats. Not only has she called John Edwards a faggot, but in the past has spoken of President Clinton's latent homosexuality, predicted that Senator Clinton "will come out of the closet" and called Vice President Gore "a total fag."

Enter art. Suppose an artist, such as a writer or an improvasional actor, wanted to create a character. First of all, to create a real character, one wants to make this character morally ambiguous. Give the character good points and bad points. For the bad points, take Ann Coulter's public bigotry. However, I'll just bet she has her good points, too. Maybe she's fun at parties; perhaps she is a good, loyal friend to that limited part of the human race with whom she chooses to be friends. Anyway, an artist can create a character combining characteristics such as those I just named.

Unfortunately, American culture is imbued with an awful lot of bad art in which the morality is often black-and-white with few shades of gray. Most Americans don't appreciate moral ambiguity. They expect to see a bigot as somebody really disgusting in every respect. They don't want to see a party girl who's genrous with her friends but subscribes to some twisted ideology that holds some people to be beyond God's grace; they want to see a murderous night rider who gets drunk and beats his wife and kids. The cop who gets him in the end is a saint and the resolution of the plot puts heaven in earth in order -- perhaps a too neat of order than those of us in the reality-based community are comfortable.

Our homophobic party girl, placed at the center of a plot, will also get her comuppance. The rebuke is probably milder, but it leave her wiser and a better person, more accepting of people she once excluded from her world and happier for it.