When Patricia Arquette made remarks during her Oscar speech last night about equal pay for women, I assumed she would face criticism from right wingers of various stripes. To a certain extent I was correct, as the usual suspects at Fox News got in a huff.
What I was not expecting was a backlash from liberals.
The issue apparently stems from off the cuff remarks Arquette made backstage after winning. The remarks were
“So the truth is, even though we sort of feel like we have equal rights in America, right under the surface, there are huge issues that are applied that really do affect women. And it’s time for all the women in America and all the men that love women, and all the gay people, and all the people of color that we’ve all fought for to fight for us now.”
Apparently, asking for support from various groups that have engaged in civil rights struggles is now somehow an insult to those groups.
My Gut Reaction: Seriously, is this what we've been reduced to? Picking apart comments by celebrities to look for possible expressions of "privilege"? No wonder we lost the last election.
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The comments I've seen on DailyKos trying to attack Arquette have ranged from the amusing to the pathetic. Some are straight up exercises in semantics, parsing her sentences to prove she excluded blacks and gays from her statement. One even went so far as to carp that in a response tweet, there was a typo in the LGBT hashtag.
The one question that comes to mind from all this is why are we wasting our time on something this trivial. Seriously, with all the genuine prejudice going around, such as the suffrage restrictions mentioned in another Oscar speech, focusing on one celebrity's wording is just plain stupid.