Apropos last Tuesday’s item, Blood Money, which claimed that Mel Gibson’s
“Passion” and the call for a Constitution amendment banning gay marriage signaled “a perverse
cultural moment,” a reader from Florida writes: “I just don’t see the connection between Gibson
and anti-gay marriage movement, aside of the fact they fall under the ‘things Jan Herman doesn’t
like’ category.”
Well, have a look this morning’s article The Culture Wars, Part II, and I quote: “[C]ulture
wars wax and wane. And in recent days, as the nation furiously debated gay marriage, Mel
Gibson’s movie, ‘The Passion of the Christ’ and Janet Jackson’s raunchy half-time show at the
Super Bowl, the culture war seemed to be waxing again.”
So yes, the Gibson thing and the anti-gay thing are “things Jan Herman doesn’t like.” But
that’s not the only reason I linked them. I suppose I should have linked the Janet Jackson boobie
show, too. What bothered me about the boobie thing is the federal government’s
reaction, courtesy of FCC chairman Michael Powell, not the boobie show itself.
