Out of Focus

You may already have heard that Utah jazz club owner, Larry Miller's, theatre in Salt Lake City has decided not to show "Brokeback Mountain," a film that deals with two gay cowboys. A spokesperson for Focus Features, the distributors of "Brokeback," said that hours before the film was to open, theater management reneged on their licensing agreement.

Gayle Ruzicka, president of the conservative group, Utah Eagle Forum, issued a statement saying "maybe there is something wrong with this show" that it's best for young people not to see. I, for one, am glad that Ms. Ruzicka, and other family value conservatives, are so preoccupied by what's appropriate, and inappropriate, for young people to see, or read. If more people thought the way the Utah Eagle Forum spokesperson does, Jack Abramoff would not have had to take the fall for the Tom DeLays, Bill Frists, and other charlatans who counterfeit values, then try to pass them off as something they received from on high. Indeed, the DeLays would have given up the ghost of corporate corruption simply as it is the right thing to do.

Likewise, if those who think they have a patent on morality, and sanction remarks by Pat Robertson about Ariel Sharon's stroke, as well as the warped view that HIV is God's perverse revenge on sinners, then generations hence will be dealing with a population explosion crisis in hell, and not on earth.

Maybe we, as a society, are a bit out of focus when we are threatened by a movie that never for a minute confuses love with profanity and, at the same time, no longer know how to distinguish between profits and prophets.