Posted on 10/02/2018 6:54:11 AM PDT by sitetest
In today’s #BelieveAllWomen environment, due process isn’t what it used to be.
It’s time for To Kill a Mockingbird to give up its treasured place in American culture.
The 1960 novel by Harper Lee was published to instant acclaim, has sold more than 30 million copies, and is ubiquitous in high-school curricula. The 1962 movie version, starring Gregory Peck, is a classic in itself and won three Academy Awards. A play based on the novel is about to open on Broadway.
This is quite the résumé for a book that, prior to the publication of a sequel in 2015 that was really the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, was Harper Lee’s only work. But nothing is forever, even for a book commonly called “timeless.” Lee’s novel is deeply out of sympathy with a moment when on college campuses, and in the culture more broadly, due process isn’t what it used to be, when it is often thought to be a hateful act to insist that allegations of sexual misconduct be proven.
A refresher on the story: It is told from the perspective of a young girl, Scout, who is the daughter of a small-town lawyer named Atticus Finch... The setting is Depression-era Alabama. Finch is unpopular in town because he has decided to take on the defense of a black man named Tom Robinson who is accused of rape by a young white woman. And this is where the story, in contemporary terms, goes off the rails. Atticus Finch didn’t #BelieveAllWomen. He didn’t take an accusation at face value. He defended an alleged rapist, vigorously and unremittingly, making use of every opportunity provided to him by the norms of the Anglo-American system of justice. He did it despite considerable social pressure to simply believe the accuser.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Good article.
The answer is simple: ban To kill a Mockingbird.
/s
Thanks.
How times have changed.
One has little if any recollection of her from the movie, which was the masterpiece of Gregory Peck's acting career, but in the story as told by Harper Lee it came through loud and clear...
‘Good article.’
can’t be a good article, even if it is, because Rich Lowry is a freethinker who sometimes goes against the orthodoxy established by this forum...an apostate, if you will among the true believers...
Scout found out that Atticus was a good old boy.
A “racist”.
Meaning that he understood, “if you’re not for yourself, no one else will be for you.”
But it took a lawyer and a rogue literary agent to stir up that trouble.
Sounds like there’s a back story one has missed out on?
Don’t keep us in suspense, please.
In the 1960s there was still dignity to be found in honor.
Now, at least among the Left that has adopted a view of life as if most everything ...
... can be broken down into having power or not having power,
... that see’s justice not in terms of individual desert but of being a victim by association,
... that assigns people as if entities either victim or oppressor status ...
... and which blindly seeks power in the name of social justice and increasingly economic justice — both of which run entirely contrary to justice for flesh and blood Persons according to their character and deeds — there is only power, and power in dishonor if it advances them is no better or worse than power with honor.
Though indeed things like virtue and honor lend themselves to views that are increasingly abhorrent to the Left, to ideas like some things are better than others or some things are objectively good or bad completely divorced from notions of social justic, and even running counter to social justice. As has been observed: if what has been wrong with the world has so often been the attempt to be right, and all of that has failed to eliminate bad things, then what must be done is to do away with discrimination between right and wrong, to do away with the idea that there are better mores and better societies. To imagine no heaven, no hell, and all the rest as the insipid song goes.
2. Because Mayella was "poor white trash."
Modern White Trash: 
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