Will Smith’s impulsive smacking of Chris Rock at the Oscars has gotten more media coverage than the movies themselves. While a very few, including New York Times columnist Roxane Gay, defended the “slap heard round the world,” most folks properly criticized the act as indefensible. Quite ironically, many a Black man has been incarcerated for a lesser offense — like taking a toke instead of not taking a joke.
If only Mr. Smith had gone to Washington, where a few Republican senators might have benefited from a smack in response to their dismal, racist, disingenuous, gratuitous attacks on a Black woman: Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The Judiciary Committee hearings were pretty awful from start to finish. While Judge Jackson comported herself admirably, I wish she had not felt it necessary to explicitly refer to religion in her opening statement: “And while I am on the subject of gratitude, I must also pause to reaffirm my thanks to God, for it is faith that sustains me at this moment.”
Despite this unnecessary reaffirmation of her faith, Sen. Lindsay Graham asked her, “What faith are you?” followed by a request to “rate” the power of her faith on a scale of 1-10. Precisely what part of the constitutional prohibition of any “religious test” for office does Graham not grasp? Neither Jackson (understandably) nor any member of the committee objected. However deep my discomfort with yet another demonstration of our quasi-theocracy, things went downhill from there.
The Grand Old Proselytizers focused their disrespectful attacks primarily on two imaginary issues: Jackson’s supposed tolerance for child pornography and her attitude toward Critical Race Theory (CRT) and inappropriate sex talk and gay indoctrination in America’s schools.
As to the child porn, I couldn’t help but wonder if Graham, Cruz, Hawley and others protesteth a bit too mucheth. Perhaps that is unfair. But still … Jackson’s sentences were well within the judicial mainstream.
The CRT nonsense was where Mr. Smith might have been useful. CRT is not in schools (although much-needed diversity and inclusion work is) and the relentless attacks were the worst kind of pandering to the GOP’s racist base. I don’t condone violence, especially against a U.S. senator, but if I ever saw a face that might — hypothetically, figuratively, fantastically, in a fevered dream sort of way — invite a smack or two, it would be Ted Cruz’s hirsute and oleaginous mug.
These culture war salvos were intended to advance the GOP efforts to eviscerate public education by invoking the sanctity of parents’ rights to decide what their children learn. Like in unconstitutionally funded Christian schools, for example, where they can learn things like:
“If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity.” (Deuteronomy 25:11-12)
“When she carried on her whoring so openly and flaunted her nakedness, I turned in disgust from her, as I had turned in disgust from her sister. Yet she increased her whoring, remembering the days of her youth, when she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses. Thus you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when the Egyptians handled your bosom and pressed your young breasts.” (Ezekiel 23:18-21)
Or from Solomon:
“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit.” (7:7)
“My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.” (1:13)
Or one of Sodom’s daughters to the other:
“Our father is old, and there is no man around here to give us children — as is the custom all over the earth. Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.” (Genesis 19:30)
As a heathen, I confess that the preceding “research” piqued, for the first time, my interest in further Bible study.
Yes, buoyed by constant attacks on school boards and Glenn Youngkin’s gubernatorial win in Virginia, “parents’ rights” is the GOP’s new rallying cry. The dangers are not just to public education. This threatens all of civil society, because the most zealous champions of parents’ rights are exhaustively, irredeemably ignorant. If parental rightists were demanding more Socrates, Rita Dove or Billy Collins, that would be one thing.
But these education warriors and their GOP-Harvard-educated enablers seek to create a generation of Biblical literalists, flat-earthers, closeted and miserable gay kids, creationists and citizens who believe slavery was not so bad and that science is radical socialist propaganda. And, of course, a steady replenishing of the supply of low-information, resentful GOP voters.
I watched and listened to this public posturing and felt pangs of empathy for the children in the minority; the children of same-sex parents, who cringe when their existence is removed from library shelves; or the children of color who are told that their Blackness is invisible, at the same time that their Blackness is the object of daily slights.
Slap about that, Mr. Smith.