Oscars and the Overton Window

The Academy Awards serve primarily to shift the Overton Window, or Window of Discourse, to the left. The winner of the Best Picture award went to a movie that nobody saw. Who would want to see a depressing movie about sex abuse under color of authority?

But the subject matter satisfies the marxist dialectic, where the Catholic Church's claim to moral authority is illegitimate.

Best Picture winners like Spotlight are one reason ratings are down. Another reason is that the biggest movie of all time wasn't even nominated. And still another reason is that everybody knew they were in for a hectoring by Chris Rock about racism, along with the usual sermons about sexism, homophobia, and the environment.

There was a running gag about Suge Knight that went nowhere. If they wanted to make racially-themed jokes, why didn't they trot out some sure-fire O.J. Simpson bits? Better yet, a running gag about Kanye West and how he likes a finger in the butt. They could have mixed in some zingers about Kim Kardashian. The whole Kardashian family is begging to be satirized. They could have mixed in a a few O.J. jokes while they were at it. One big reason O.J. was acquitted was because of Kim's father, Robert. Dead white women? Funny, funny stuff!

But they would have had to avoid the biggest joke of 2015, Caitlyn Jenner. Joking about Caitlyn has moved beyond the Overton Comedy Window. In fact, it would appear the Overton Comedy Window has been reduced to a peephole in a door. That is a needle nearly impossible to thread.

Not that they didn't try. The funniest thing last night was when Stacy Dash lasciviously walked onstage and proclaimed "Happy Black History Month!" Many people in the audience were aware that Dash goes on Fox News and criticizes Black Lives Matter and Black History Month. This crowd didn't know whether it was even permissible to laugh.

Best Actor went to Leonardo DiCaprio. He used his acceptance speech to diatribe about climate change. "Our production needed to move to the southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species," he said.

If DiCaprio truly believed that climate change was going to destroy "our entire species," then he would be too traumatized to ever again board his private jet to fly to his private island in Belize.

The most truly absurd moment of the show was when Vice President Joe Biden talked about sexual assault. "We must and we can change the culture. So that no abused womam or man, like the survivors you will see tonight, ever feel they ever have to ask themselves 'what did i do?' They did nothing wrong."

By "change the culture," Ol' Joe means let's teach men not to rape. Rape jokes are now totally outside the Overton Window. Unless a woman makes one. And by saying, "they did nothing wrong," Joe means that women possess total agency over their sexuality, unless they experience regret.

The juxtaposition of a segment honoring sexual assault "survivors," with Whoopi Goldberg being a presenter, is just too perfect to ignore. Whoopi and her whole cadre excused Roman Polanski's sodomy of a thirteen-year old girl. Whoopi dishonored her by dismissing it as less than rape. "It wasn't rape-rape," she said.

Honorable mention has to go to Alicia Vikander, who won for Best Supporting Actress. The movie, The Danish Girl, is the story about transgender woman Lili Elbe. Xe/Xir was one of the "first known recipients of gender confirmation surgery." That's what they're going to call it now. Gender Confirmation Surgery.

I remember my Confirmation. It was the moment in my life when I made a mature commitment to Christ, and received strength from the Holy Spirit through prayer and the laying on of hands by a bishop. Now the meaning of the word "confirmation" will be to describe genital mutilation. Hacking off a penis or spackling over a twat will be "confirmation" of what in reality is same-sex attraction with opposite-gender fetishization. But homosexual activists want their word, and have colonized the language yet again.

And so the Overton Window for transgender issues expands relentlessly leftward.