|
Gibson has been the darling of conservatives long before his historically-challenged film, The Patriot whitewashed the American Revolution: He has been stalwart in his opposition to abortion; he favors capital punishment; has opposed birth control; and has occasionally put his foot in his mouth over gay and lesbian issues. "They take it up the ass," Gibson told the Spanish publication, El Pais in a January 1992 interview, as he bent over and pointed to his rear-end. "This is only for taking a shit," he said. When asked by interviewer Koro Castellano about working with gays while studying at the School of Dramatic Arts, Gibson added: "They were good people, kind, I like them. But their thing is not my thing." Castellano said, "But you were obsessed with the thought that if you were an actor, people would confuse you with one of them." "Yes," Gibson admitted, "but I did it. I became an actor despite that. But with this look, who's going to think I'm gay? It would be hard to take me for someone like that. Do I sound like a homosexual?" he asked. "Do I talk like them? Do I move like them? What happens is when you're an actor, they stick that label on you," Gibson said. "I go from playing rugby one week to taking dance classes in black leotards the next. Many of the girls that I met in school took it for granted that I was gay." Gibson's Catholicism The Gibson controversy grows in part out of a report that the actor had recently completed the building of a church in near Malibu that caters to a revisionist version of Catholicism. According to the New York Times, "the church is operated by a nonprofit corporation; according to public financial records, Gibson is its director, chief executive officer and sole benefactor, making more than $2.8 million in contributions over the past three years." News about the new church came on the heels of reports about the actor/director's latest film project - the making of The Passion which, according to ABC News, is "rooted in a theological movement known as Catholic traditionalism that seeks to return the faith to its pre-1962 period, before the Pope issued what is known as Vatican II, a series of proclamations that did away with the notion that Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus." Gibson's theology, writes Christopher Noxon in the New York Times, "is a strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives -- including a seminary dropout and rabble-rousing theologist who also happens to be Mel Gibson's father." In the 1992 El Pais interview, Gibson said that "For 1,950 years [the church] does one thing and then in the 60s, all of a sudden they turn everything inside out and begin to do strange things that go against the rules. "Everything that had been heresy is no longer heresy, according to the [new] rules. We [Catholics] are being cheated. ... The church has stopped being critical. It has relaxed. I don't believe them, and I have no intention of following their trends. It's the church that has abandoned me, not me who has abandoned it," he said. Frederick Clarkson, the veteran right-wing researcher and author of Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy (Common Courage Press) told WorkingForChange in an e-mail that "Traditionalist Catholics describes those who insist on practicing the Latin mass and other features of the church prior to the reforms of Vatican II. Some Traditionalists operate within the Church; others belong to a faction, the Society of Saint Pius X that has been excommunicated en mass for disobedience to the Pope. Its far right views include conspiracy theories that the Catholic Church is controlled by liberals as a result of an ancient conspiracy of Freemasons."
Meet the parents Gibson recently told the Italian newspaper Il Giornale that his "love for religion was transmitted to me by my father." According to Christopher Noxon, Hutton Gibson is "a well-known author and activist who has railed against the Vatican for more than 30 years. His books on the topic include Is the Pope Catholic? and The Enemy Is Here.'' In an interview, the elder Gibson told Noxon that he "flatly rejected that Al Qaeda hijackers had anything to do with the attacks" on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11. "Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson said. "So what happened?" Noxon asked. "They were crashed by remote control," said Gibson. Gibson's father, with his mother Joye apparently in agreement, also claimed that the Holocaust never happened. "Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told Noxon. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?" The myth of the Holocaust was, the Gibson family contended, was a plot between Adolph Hitler and "financiers" to get the Jews out of Germany and into the Middle East where they could confront the Arabs. Joye Gibson added that there "weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe." The Passion
According to Engelhard, Gibson came on with O'Reilly "mainly to denounce alleged media harassment. Apparently -- as was disclosed on the show -- one or more news types have been checking up on Gibson, going over his background, supposedly hounding his 85-year-old father. This is standard procedure when a moviemaker, or any public person, goes into something so controversial -- people want to know where he's been. "It's called research," writes Engelhard. "But using O'Reilly as his platform, Gibson envisions something sinister about the research into his background. The New York Post points to the New York Times as 'leading the Gibson investigation.' It needs to be emphasized that nobody on O'Reilly said it was 'the Jews' and, in fact, a follow-up segment the next day blamed the 'secular' media for anti-Christian bias." Gibson has whined about being persecuted before. In 1997, best-selling author Patricia Nell Warren wrote that Gibson complained of being "chased by automobiles doing dangerous things on the freeway. People have tried to spit on me. It's made me totally paranoid." His "paranoia," wrote Warren was "due to the Gibson-watch being done by GLAAD and other human-rights activists in the gay community." Bill O'Reilly and other conservative pundits have enjoyed bashing Hollywood's liberal "elite" over their anti-war political views. The gas-bags would never think to include Gibson in the mix. And while he didn't get to it during his mid-January interview, here's a Gibson quote from a 1995 Playboy interview that O'Reilly might want to delve into sometime in the future: ''There's something to do with the Federal Reserve that Lincoln did, Kennedy did and Reagan tried. I can't remember what it was. My dad told me about it. Everyone who did this particular thing that would have fixed the economy got undone. Anyway, I'll end up dead if I keep talking.'' As a survey recently reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer pointed out, "Anti-Semitism is widespread among America's young adults, with a fourth believing Jews control the media and Wall Street…Another key finding is that 37 percent of American adults, or 65 million people, continue to believe Jews were responsible for killing Jesus….The Christ-killer charge remains a pervasive belief." Will Gibson's film add fuel to anti-Semitism's fire? When O'Reilly asked Gibson whether his film might particularly upset Jews. ''It may,'' he said. ''It's not meant to. I think it's meant to just tell the truth. I want to be as truthful as possible. But when you look at the reasons why Christ came, why he was crucified -- he died for all mankind and he suffered for all mankind. So that, really, anyone who transgresses has to look at their own part or look at their own culpability.'' |
|
Mel Gibson, here in What Women Want, reportedly heads a new Catholic church in Malibu 
Justice Antonin Scalia is another Traditionalist 
Mel Gibson went on Bill O'Reilly's show on January 17 to discuss The Passion© 1997-2008 BEI
The sexual orientation of individuals pictured in and writers for
Gay Today should not be assumed.
