Though seeing Sean Penn deliver a "best actor" Academy Awards acceptance speech that was more taunt against political enemies than expression of gratitude toward industry friends made me click off, reading Ben Shapiro's transcription of Penn's graceless tirade clicked on a few neurons. "I think it is a good time for those who voted against gay marriage to contemplate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes. We need to have equal rights for everyone." Contra Sean Penn, and speaking as a Massachusettsan and not a Californian, I think it is a good time for those who imposed gay marriage to contemplate their great shame and the shame in their grandparents' eyes. Liberals, perhaps out of contempt for what has come before or an agnosticism in the afterlife, don't care or think about how they appear to the past. The imaginary future, where Sean Penn's every view is conventional wisdom, instead serves as the anchor of their morality.

Aren't my children already going to hate me because I voted for a war criminal? Or because I supported the "theft" called property--or perhaps they will hate me because I'm an adherent of a medieval religion....

Hey, in any likely future world envisioned by Penn, the only chance I have is to repent!

Well said Dan!

That is an amazing way to think really, to have such a hatred of the past and oddly sacred view of the future. It is an attitude amazingly lacking in common sense and a dismissal of the Fifth Commandment.

Right. Penn reveals what he thinks of *his* grandparents with this statement.

When you think all of human history is progressive, it's natural to lend no weight to what those who came before you might have thought. After all, in the case of the US, who would that be except for slave-owning, segregating, rights-denying, fag-hating neanderthals who haven't yet been disabused of their faith in "God and guns"?

The future is sacred because it's their promised land, their Utopia, where all the supposed inequities of this time will be washed away, replaced with completely equal outcomes.

Isn't this Marx?

It's progress over tradition, ideas over people, and perfectibility of man's nature over his fallen nature. That last one wasn't parallel but you all know what I'm saying.