By: the Common Constitutionalist
When one wishes to take the pulse of the real radical left, you need to know where to look. Oh, I don’t mean just liberals like CNN or the Washington Post. I’m talking about radicals who think liberals aren’t liberal enough. For news on that front, you need to go to sites like MoveOn.org, ThinkProgress or the ACLU.
That being said – who doesn’t think Hollywood is progressive enough? Well, evidently the radicals at the ACLU (yes, I know that’s redundant) don’t believe progressive Hollywood is progressive enough.
Normally I would never side with the ACLU on anything. They are awful and a wholly un-American organization. But I do so enjoy when smug leftists in Hollywood get caught by other leftists not practicing what they preach.
For decades cloistered Hollywood has been on the cutting edge of every new “civil right” and liberal cause to come down the pike. But recently even it has come under fire.
We all remember the big flap over the lack of black representation at the last Academy Awards and the fight for equal pay for actresses, headlined by Jennifer Lawrence who only grossed $52 million in 2015. Poor girl.
If that’s not bad enough, “last summer, the ACLU asked federal and state agencies to explore whether gender discrimination is responsible for the dearth of female directors in the entertainment industry.” The federal investigation will be headed up by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.
Normally to this, any reasonable person would cry foul. We would ask what right the federal government has to scrutinize Hollywood, or any industry for such a thing. It’s one thing to prove that poor little actresses get paid less than actors. That’s just simple math. But to attempt to prove gender discrimination “for a dearth of female directors” is ludicrous and seemingly impossible.
Yet statistics show of the top movies last year, only seven percent were directed by females. Oh the horror! But maybe most female directors just stink at directed these “top” movies. Look at them from last year. Star Wars, Mad Max, Jurassic World, The Avengers. All big budget action flicks. Is it possible that female directors are just not suited to direct these types of movies? Of course it is and of course they are not. It should be as simple as that.
But then we would come to our senses and realize who we’re dealing with – a far left radical organization in cahoots with an equally radical administration which thinks everything is its business and is the sole arbiter of fairness. In the eyes of the radical left, unfairness cannot exist – unless one is a conservative or Christian or worse – both.
“We’re very encouraged by how seriously the government has taken this,” attorney Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California, said. How does she (I assume she’s a she) fit that on a business card? And is that a microaggression, blindly assigning a gender to Melissa? Hard to say anymore – but I digress.
Goodman says, “the federal investigation has included meetings with directors and other stakeholders in the industry.” And we all know how those meetings went. “We’re from the Obama administration. Sit down, shut up and do as we command.”
Goodman noted, however, “that federal investigators are not bound by any timeline and are not obligated to reveal any results or take any action on their findings.”
So these federal agencies, which we all pay for, have no time constraints and don’t have to reveal any of their findings? They can just go in, disrupt these businesses and are not obligated to account for the disruption? That sounds rather heavy-handed. Oops – just came to my senses again. I forgot I was talking about the all-powerful federal government.
Here’s how things will go. The ACLU will get some sort of payoff. The movie industry will agree to hire women as figurehead directors and the producers and stakeholders will agree to put the daughters and nephews (and maybe attorney Goodman) of a few of the federal investigators in a movie. Problem solved.
Although this is yet another incredible waste of taxpayer dollars and an affront to liberty, it is fun to watch liberal Hollywood get called on the carpet for just trying to deal with the realities of business like the rest of us.