Some Like It Not

Last week I watched the 1959 classic Some Like it Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon. It was probably considered a wicked film by Christian contemporaries, but I enjoyed its humour. Without spoiling the tale, two men dress up as women to avoid the mob, both delighting and complaining about ‘becoming’ the other sex. In the closing scene, a smitten, elderly millionaire who proposed to one of the ‘girls’, doesn’t change his mind when he’s finally told his fiancé’s true identity. It’s funny, because such things are clearly ridiculous. Or they were. In the 2020s, men living as women and vice versa will become increasingly normal, and woe betide anyone who dares balk at such arrangements. The film’s closing joke doesn’t seem so funny now; it rather seems sadly prophetic.  

Maria Steen, in the Irish Times, commented on modern liberals’ intolerance of any who don’t subscribe to their shibboleths:

If tolerance were a significant organising ethical principle it would require those who espouse it to put up with views that they disagree with. However, in a neat semantic trick, it is instead asserted that the views of which liberals do not approve are themselves intolerant, and therefore do not need to be tolerated. Indeed they should not be tolerated. 

Tolerance, in fact, actually requires that they not be tolerated. And so the circle is squared and what might have seemed to be a restraint in fact turns out to be a reinforcement of liberals’ ethical entitlement – or even duty – not to have to put up with ideas with which they disagree. (24/8/19)

Ridiculous and comedic scenarios have a habit of becoming mainstream and normal.

A wise man’s heart is at his right hand,

But a fool’s heart at his left.

Even when a fool walks along the way,

He lacks wisdom,

And he shows everyone that he is a fool.

Ecclesiastes 10: 2-3.

A new government is today being arranged in our nation. Dare we hope for one that will stay the rate of moral decline, or at least tolerate Christians’ minority views? 

Image by gdakaska from Pixabay