I hate that I am writing about this. This is pure venting on my part. But most the world seems to have gone out of its collective mind. The people defending Polanski, Terry Gilliam, the nation of France, and others, shock me. (Well, not France.)

If you could attribute the exact same acts to some random guy named Robert Poland from Gary, Indiana, they'd call him a pedophilic creep and refuse to let him live anywhere near their neighborhood. This is not mere conjecture: we have sex-offender roles in the US, which last, now, a lifetime. There are people on them who have done far, far less than Polanski, and have been convicted on far less evidence. Such people are harassed, attacked, driven from communities, and generally unemployable. And unlike Polanski, these sex offenders have actually done their time already. (Murderers are, quite frankly, treated better.)

Yet, from Polanski's defenders, there is NO discernible public outcry about the tens of thousands in such situations. Never has been. Why? Because they're not famous, they're not wealthy, they're not artists, they don't prominently voice the shibboleths of the left. They cry for Polanski because primarily he's their friend, not because they are outraged by the objective details of the situation. If Tom Delay were being arrested under similar grounds, you wouldn't hear the end of the cries for the most gruesome punishment imaginable. (I hear them already.)

Rule of law? No, selective application based on what works for me today.

Also: Kudos to those who are voicing the plain facts. Susan Estrich, herself a rape victim, points out that the state, not just the victim, has a need to prosecute rape. (From firsthand experience, she notes the victim always wants it to just "go away", but that doesn't protect future victims.) And kudos to Jewel, for stating the obvious:

Polanski-admitted raping a 13 yr old-whys every1 in the arts upset hes facing jail? cause hes a gifted director? what am i missing?

And in particular, Kate Harding at Salon, who writes a vulgar and blunt piece, but which is necessary reading for those who don't understand what Polanski did, or don't want to face it:

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let's just start right there... Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop...

I won't quote further, because RO's own standards don't allow it here. If you read it and find what she says crude, remember that reading or writing it isn't nearly as obscene as him doing it. To a child. A crying, begging child.

Let's also talk, for a moment, about mercy.

Polanski's defenders are big on granting him mercy. They believe that it is the high mark of civilization to be merciful, and moreso to those who have done the most unlovely things. If we are civilized, we will be "merciful" to Polanski.

This is nonsense.

Mercy is preceded by justice. To illustrate: if you commit a crime, and escape conviction, you're not being shown "mercy." Likewise, if you're wrongly convicted, letting you out isn't an act of "mercy", it's merely just.

So before a person can ask for forgiveness, or leniency, they must believe their conviction was just. They must recognize what they did was wrong. They must agree the punishment reflects the severity of their crime, regret what they did for the act itself — not just its effect on them. Absent that, they're not asking for mercy. They're saying they didn't do anything morally wrong, and that don't really deserve punishment.

It's not clear any of those preconditions apply to Polanski — or his ever-more-creepy defenders. By fleeing, he denied the rightness of even the mild terms initially handed to him. Further, his take at the time made it clear he didn't think there was anything that wrong or unusual about what he did:

If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But... f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!

In Polanski's mind, everybody secretly desires to do just what he did. Ick.

And, of course, every time his friends argue it was "unfair" for him to be convicted, or that it's unfair for him to be prosecuted now, they're saying he is not guilty of anything serious — like Polanski, that raping a girl isn't a really big deal. Go read Kate Harding's crude essay (or read it again) if this somehow escapes you. What he did would have been rape, in the simplest and most brutal meaning, if the girl had been 21 or 25. Her being 13 doesn't somehow make it more acceptable.

And was he "punished" enough already? Again, the cluelessness of this argument is stunning: Ask any person convicted for a sexual offense in the US if they would have given everything they had to trade their prison time — much less their post-prison experience — for Polanski's life, post-conviction. Heck, I think a lot of people who have never done a day in jail would love to trade their own situation for his. Let's be real, here, folks.