I’m only familiar with Ellen Page because in 2007 she starred in a perhaps unintentional but still subtly spectacular pro-life movie called Juno. The thirty-one-year-old atheist and “pro-choice feminist” actress snortingly repudiates any anti-abortion sub-text in the film. Even so, and unfortunately for her “reproductive rights” indignation, Juno‘s plot remains what it is: poignantly unfriendly to baby-killing. If you haven’t seen the film, take a look and tell me it doesn’t winsomely plead: Choose life!
Anyway, she’s all over media lately, positively reeking with progressive angst and outrage. Earlier this month on Stephen Colbert’s late night TV lib-fest, she addressed the alleged physical assault on gay actor Jussie Smollet, laying its blame at the feet of … Vice President Mike Pence? Yup. She insisted, literally tearfully, the former Indiana Governor’s “hate” toward homosexuals cut the path for the crime against the Empire cast member.
Mind you, a mounting body of evidence now suggests Smollet almost certainly staged the incident; i.e., it never happened. But forget about that — Pence is a conservative Christian. He presumably believes what the Scriptures teach about same-sex conduct and marriage. Ergo: Page accuses Donald Trump’s number two is “in a position of power and … hate[s] people” and has spent his “career trying to cause suffering”. His hands drip with the blood of any gay-attack victim, you see, be they Smollet or whoever. “Connect the dots!” she implored as the talk-host looked on in reverential silence.
Ellen Page is plainly unaware when then-Hoosier Governor Pence was pushing his state’s version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act back in 2015, he crumbled before the yowling of the Lavender Mafia like Thanos had snapped his fingers. Or that, in the early months of the Trump administration, he endorsed keeping sexual orientation and gender identity on the government’s list of officially protected categories, just as we do with skin color and ethnicity; and implied it’s “discrimination” and “prejudice” to balk at doing so.
Not exactly a saber-toothed “homophobe” crusader, by my lights.
But Mike Pence dares agree with Moses, Jesus and the Apostle Paul on matters sexual and matrimonial — so, Ms. Page’s verdict? “Hater!”
But she wasn’t finished: A week ago, the Canadian-born thespian trained her trendy sights on Chris Pratt and the church he attends. Page tweeted that the Guardians of the Galaxy‘s “church is infamously anti lgbtq” and “hates a certain group of people”, presumably slamming Zoe Church and Hillsong, two LA congregations where Pratt shows up. The pastor of the latter group remarked in a 2015 interview that his organization believes the Bible does not condone homosexual conduct or “gay marriage” and so it doesn’t place practicing homosexuals in its leadership positions. Meanwhile, he went to great — some would say fulsome — lengths to emphasize that everyone is welcome to be a part of Hillsong.
Not good enough for Page, who will accept nothing less than every house of worship on the planet’s jumping up and down in rhapsodic delirium over every act of same-sex canoodling. She won’t rest until they unhesitatingly equate two males “marrying” or two females tying the knot with the more traditional version of same. In Ellen Page’s cosmos, Bible-embracers will be made to submit to her values on every level.
Umm … I’m supposed to junk the wisdom of the ages, including the tenets of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, almost every historic world-religion, 5000-plus years of human convention spanning pretty much every civilization, not to mention the flint-eyed facts of biology, exactly why? Because Ellen Page gets on nighttime TV and lectures us with a quaver in her voice?
Ms. Page is the latest example of an irksome tick nurtured by American society: elevating celebrities to the position of cultural guru, endowing them with a head-spinningly outsized clout to steer the moral course for three-hundred-twenty-six million people.
Not long ago it was TV-talker Samantha Bee who, for a brief spell, took her crack at serving as national, secular-progressive opinion-massager for the onlooking masses Toilet-mouthed comedienne Sarah Silverman seems to pop in and out of the rarified position on a regular basis, splashing her misbegotten and usually profane puddles of commentary on whoever is within listening distance. Speaking of profane, actor Robert De Niro was promoted for a time to societal oracle, sneering, snarling and vilely disgorging his f-bomb-laden views on the contemporary political situation whenever he could work it in. Then, we mustn’t forget the perennial Alec Baldwin.
While these entertainment-world luminaries are practically jostling aside one another for lefty mouthpiece duty. they dependably share a few disconcerting tendencies: reflections regularly larded with obscenity; crass, malicious focus on obliterating the other side versus simply providing an alternative viewpoint or correcting the record; factual ignorance, misinformation. It’s also usually the case hysteria lurks nearby when they launch their pontifications.
All of which sparks this vital query: Why credit these people with any authority to shape our impressions, our laws, our community? To be sure, they’ve as much right as any other human being to ventilate their convictions and feelings. The First Amendment applies to Lotus-land loudmouths as much as anyone else.
We enjoy the flip-side right to ignore them, to refuse to empower them to influence the world around us in any material way.
Ellen Page, and many of her confrères, are clearly distressed individuals; and that’s a shame. Their emotional malaise, however, doesn’t provide cover for their frantic, misbegotten, usually vengeful screeds against those with the effrontery to cultivate moral principles at odds with theirs. Watching the clip of Ms. Page lachrymosely smearing VP Pence the other evening, I was struck with this stop-me-in-my-tracks reaction: Why should Ellen Page’s appraisal of Mike Pence carry any weight with me?
Last time I checked, there’s no legislation compelling us to respect the rantings of these show biz propagandists. At least not yet. Although that could change if their revolving line-up keeps doing its thing — if, ultimately, they have their way with the mesmerized minions hanging on their every spotlight utterance.
Image: Excerpted from Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27440604
