Our country is so pathetic in how we are obsessed with “sex scandals.” As far as I’m concerned, Spitzer’s personal life is his own business — money laundering and hypocrisy aside. He was in the process of making the Bush administration’s business ours, but I guess sex trumps $200-billion taxpayer-funded loan shark bailouts, sub-prime mortgage thievery (see the Mar. 14 post below), and pandering to Saudi-owned banks every time.
Enza Sebastiani writes: Director/Writer Rod Lurie in his movie “The Contender” (2000), starring Joan Allen (Senator Laine Hanson), Jeff Bridges (President Jackson Evans), and Gary Oldman (Rep. Sheldon Runyon), brings to life an idealistic candidate for the vice-presidential chair: a sharp, honest, and driven woman whose personal life is dragged into the middle of a vicious sex scandal. Her ethics and principles prevent her from commenting on these allegations. In this speech, divinely performed by Joan Allen, Senator Hanson speaks the pure and simple truth about what really matters to her, first of all as a woman, then as a Senator. Here is the script of that scene:
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen of the committee:
Uh, remarkably enough, it seems that I have some explaining to do. So… let me be absolutely clear.
I stand for a woman’s right to choose. I stand for the elimination of the death penalty. I stand for a strong and growing armed forces because we must stomp out genocide on this planet, and I believe that that is a cause worth dying for.
I stand for seeing every gun taken out of every home. Period. I stand for making the selling of cigarettes to our youth a federal offense. I stand for term limits and campaign reform.
And, Mr. Chairman, I stand for the separation of church and state, and the reason that I stand for that is the same reason that I believe our forefathers did. It is not there to protect religion from the grasp of government… but to protect our government from the grasp of religious fanaticism.
I may be an atheist… but that does not mean I do not go to church — I do go to church. The church I go to is the one that emancipated the slaves… that gave women the right to vote. It gave us every freedom that we hold dear.
My church is this very chapel of democracy that we sit in together, and I do not need God to tell me what are my moral absolutes. I need my heart, my brain, and this church.
