A shameful double standard

Last week, country music star Hank Williams Jr. characterized the “golf summit” between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner as “like Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu.”

Although Williams subsequently tried to explain that he was just trying to illustrate the ideological gulf between the Democratic President and Republican Speaker, it was, to say the least, in extremely poor taste to compare legitimate philosophical differences between law-abiding American political leaders with Hitler’s campaign of hatred and genocide against the Jewish people. Amid allegations that the singer had compared President Obama to Adolph Hitler, media retribution was swift and harsh: Williams was dropped not only from his Monday Night Football intro gig, but from any further association with ESPN.  

Last Sunday, actress Susan Sarandon, during an interview at the Hamptons Film Festival, called Pope Benedict XVI a “Nazi.” According to Newsday.com, while talking about her 1995 anti-death penalty film, “Dead Man Walking,” Sarandon said she had sent a copy of the book on which the film was based to the pope — “The last one, not this Nazi one we have now.”   

When her interviewer “gently tut-tutted,” according to Newsday.com reporter Rafer Guzman, Sarandon — rather than try in any way to modify or clarify her comment, as Williams had done  — “only repeated her remark.”

Putting aside for the moment the pathetic spectacle of this privileged American actress vilifying a man who as a child suffered with his family under the oppression of Hitler’s reign of terror, the question arises: Will Susan Sarandon suffer any professional consequences, the way Hank Williams Jr. has?  

Not likely, for two reasons. First, unlike Williams, Susan Sarandon is esteemed as part of the “socially conscious” Hollywood set active in various politically correct causes. She is to be protected, not criticized, by mainstream media. Indeed, when Sarandon declined to even try to soften her statement, the Newsday reporter undertook to do it for her, suggesting that she “may have only used ‘Nazi’ to mean ‘dictatorial’ or ‘cold’” — absurd mischaracterizations themselves, given the personal warmth and pastoral approach so evident in Pope Benedict’s style of leadership.  

More significantly, Sarandon picked the right target. For while America’s cultural elite present themselves as paragons of tolerance and  inclusion — and would recoil in horror at the very suggestion that they are even capable of any form of prejudice — they continue to maintain a shameful double standard in which the Catholic Church is fair game as a target of bigotry and ridicule.  

In the big picture, that is even more troubling than Susan Sarandon’s hate speech.