With all due respect to Bill Condon, whose work I really respect and admire, this statement from him about the contribution to Prop 8 by Richard Raddon, the Mormon director of the LA Film Festival,is just idiotic:
[Bill] Condon, the gay writer-director of "Dreamgirls" and a Film Independent board member, offered this retort to what he calls the "off-with-his-head" crowd: "If you're asking, 'Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?' . . . the answer is, 'Of course we do.' But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry."
This sounds like either denial from a man who is in the uncomfortable position of doing business with people who would like to take away his rights or Condon really simply hasn't thought this through at all -- or both. All bigots have used religion and religious beliefs to justify their bigotry, including those who have discriminated against African-Americans and Jews. So how could he say that he takes discrimination against gays as seriously as he does against those groups while in the same breath saying that support for Prop 8 was "religious" and therefore not "proof" of bigotry? Sorry Bill, bigotry is bigotry, no matter what it is disguised. And you should really be embarrassed and ashamed by that statement.
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