The Latest Moral Crusade of Andrew Sullivan

Chronic failure Andrew Sullivan is incensed that Jodie Foster did not publicly fight for gay rights, instead trying to preserve a little privacy throughout the length of her extremely public life.

I'm thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I'm saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all - winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award - to do so.

Sullivan is not just an activist for gay rights, he's also an activist for white people seeking to prove the genetic inferiority of blacks. But he's furious that Foster brought her friend Mel Gibson to the event.

Her date last night, believe it or not, was wife-abusing, homophobic anti-Semite, Mel Gibson. Would you entrust your young sons to a man with Gibson's violent and vile history?

Mel Gibson, at least, has a reason for being a bigoted nut; he was cruelly and thoroughly brainwashed by a bigoted, nutty ultra-Catholic father. (The linked post is extremely good.) Gibson is the inevitable product of his grossly authoritarian upbringing but Foster, a highly respected figure, is his friend anyway. There is probably a little more to him than his demons.

But what is Andrew Sullivan's excuse for his own demons, that set him to persecute his political enemies in the tradition of the very worst anti-Semites and homophobes? Watching Sullivan rack up page hits by trashing yet another woman he deems "narcissistic" and "self-loving" is nothing new but it seems that many people never tire of Sullivan's man-of-the-world-man-of-the-people shtick.

Sullivan quotes Foster saying:

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, co-workers, and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now, apparently, I’m told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a prime-time reality show.
 

Bizarrely, Sullivan ignores Foster's statement that she came out publicly to the people in her life, the only people with whom she felt that she should share the information.

What unadulterated bullshit. She never came out until, very obliquely, in 2007.

Sullivan's public is not Foster's public. Sullivan wants as much attention as possible and built a career based on  forcing the public to accept the legitimacy of a gay Catholic Tory/Republican. He is driven by his demons to gain public recognition and admiration, in which he finds personal validation. Foster has lived in the public eye all her life. And of course she does not mention it but her early adulthood was spent in an especially and  horribly conspicuous public circus, when John Hinkley Jr. shot Ronald Reagan to impress her. 

[S]eriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then, maybe, then you too would value privacy against all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was. I have given everything up there, from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?
 

 Foster was probably referring to the loss of privacy in our crowded and security-minded world as well as her own media-saturated life but Sullivan unaccountably assumes she is talking about his own predominate concerns.

 "How beautiful it once was"? When gay people were put in jail, or mental institutions, or thrown out of their families - all because of the "beauty" of privacy for Hollywood royalty like Foster?

Foster was born in 1962. It's more than a little unfair to blame her for events that were already changing when she was a little girl. It is especially unfair to blame Hollywood for public persecution of gays. Rock Hudson was not obligated to ruin his career so Andrew Sullivan wouldn't have to deal with the homophobes in his own party.

When someone defends Foster's desire to live her life on her own terms Sullivan just hand-waves the issue away.

Yes, yes, yes. But the only way we were ever going to get past that oppression was through it. I'm thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I'm saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all - winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award - to do so.

There is something very familiar about such a complaint. Oh, I know. Andrew Sullivan now lives a richer, fuller life with less fear because soldiers far less powerful than he make the sacrifice of their lives and limbs to feed his career. Andrew Sullivan is evidently hoping that Jodie Foster will do the same.