Here's a few more voices of sanity on the Roman Polanski arrest:
Bill Bennett --
...When scandals turned up in the Catholic church, the elites — as everyone — were rightly shocked. It was a major, several year story. And the abuses investigated, detailed, and condemned went back to 1950, 27 years earlier than Polanski's crime. Priests and parishes and archdioceses were punished and sued and even bankrupted. There is a major double standard here — not because that is what is wrong, but because what Polanski did was wrong and too many want to dismiss it and move on — because he's in the favored class of the elite.
Are these artists and other Polanski defenders really saying a child can be drugged and raped, a 13-year-old child mind you, and the consequence is time, for simply time — never mind fleeing justice — will heal that? This is a horrible message, and the artistic industry, so callous to claims about lyrics encouraging this kind of trashy behavior in the past, better get it right when the behavior is real and when the message they send is one that most people — rightly — abhor. You want to know why Michael Medved titled his book Hollywood v. America? It wasn't because of this case, but it might just as well be now. Who defends child rape? Well, now you know who.
Paul Mirengoff from Power Line --
...It's difficult for me to understand the basis for demanding Polanski's release. Sure, he was a great film director, but then O.J. Simpson was a great running back.
There can't be any serious argument that great artists have license to drug 13 year-old girls and then have sex (in this case anal sex) with them. Nor can there be any serious claim that Polanski should be absolved because he was because he was in a downward spiral at the time he committed his crime, which I think was an argument made on his behalf before he fled the country.
Polanski can, of course, argue extenuating circumstances at a sentencing hearing. However, the truth seems to be that he just wants to have sex with young girls. As he put it a few years after he fled to Europe: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... f___ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f___ young girls. Juries want to f___ young girls. Everyone wants to f__ young girls!"
That quote should make good reading at a sentencing hearing.
Miranda Devine, Sydney Morning Herald columnist --
How sickening is the chorus of sycophants and enablers defending Roman Polanski, the 76-year-old Polish director arrested at a Zurich film festival over a three decade-old statutory rape case.
Polanski has been a fugitive from US justice since he skipped bail after being charged over the rape and sodomy of a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's Los Angeles home in 1977...
Polanski was a sexual predator. Who cares if it was three decades ago? Who cares if his wife was butchered? Who cares if the victim has grown up and absolved him? None of that is the point. If he were a Catholic priest arrested for child sex abuse 30 years ago there would be no pleas for leniency, nor should there be.
Polanski's defenders complain those who think he should face justice are "shrill". But the shrillness is from them. It is the same tone we heard from the defenders of Bill Henson's right to photograph nude 13-year-olds, who branded those opposed to exploiting naked pubescent children as philistines gripped by "moral panic".
In this cowardly age, cultivated people seem terrified of being seen as unsophisticated on such matters.
