{"id":311,"date":"2010-07-27T04:00:25","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T10:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=311"},"modified":"2010-07-27T04:00:25","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T10:00:25","slug":"who-gets-your-hard-earned-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=311","title":{"rendered":"Who Gets Your Hard-Earned Money?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Anti-Semites have added a new player to their team.\u00a0 More accurately, he was probably\u00a0already on the team, but most people outside of Hollywood did not know it.\u00a0 I speak of Oliver Stone, the film director who recently outed himself as a raging anti-Semite during an interview with The Sunday Times of London<\/a>.\u00a0 This revelation should surprise no one.\u00a0 For a man who considers Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez a friend and who believes\u00a0Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is misunderstood, the leftist director of films such as Platoon<\/em>, Wall Street<\/em>, , Born on the\u00a0Fourth of July<\/em>, The Doors<\/em>, JFK<\/em>\u00a0and W<\/em> has been one of liberalism’s most prolific cultural spokesmen for the last 25 years.<\/p>\n

The last Oliver Stone directed\u00a0movie that I\u00a0saw\u00a0at the theater was Any Given Sunday<\/em>, released in 1999. The combination of Al Pacino and professional football was too great a temptation for me\u00a0to resist, even if Stone was the director.\u00a0 Before that, it had been 12 years since I paid to see Wall Street<\/em> (1987), a film I thoroughly enjoyed during my college years and which still holds up quite well\u00a0more than\u00a020 years later.<\/p>\n

Judged purely from an artistic perspective,\u00a0Oliver Stone must be considered one of the greatest directors of his generation. With two Oscars (Platoon<\/em> and Born on the Fourth of July<\/em>) and three Golden Globes (Platoon<\/em>, Born on the Fourth of July<\/em>, and JFK<\/em>) for Best Director to his credit, Stone has been one of\u00a0Hollywood’s most influential film-makers.\u00a0 As much as I dislike the content of many of Stone’s movies, I believe that the freedom of speech we enjoy in this country gives him the right to make whatever movies he chooses.\u00a0<\/p>\n

However, that same freedom allows me to choose what movies I spend my money seeing.\u00a0 I have chosen to not\u00a0waste any more money on\u00a0supporting Oliver Stone’s lucrative\u00a0West Coast venture\u00a0(although if he directs a Star Trek<\/em> sequel, I’ll be sorely tempted yet again to open my wallet).\u00a0\u00a0However, who we\u00a0choose to support with our money\u00a0is not limited to movies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How do you decide who\u00a0earns your business?\u00a0 Does the business owner have to share your political or religious views for you to spend your money in their establishment?\u00a0 Do you want to know what the owner’s personal beliefs are before you step foot inside their\u00a0store?\u00a0 Does it make a difference if the owner is a Democrat or a Republican, a conservative or a liberal, a Christian or an Atheist, pro-life or pro-choice?<\/p>\n

In our town, there are two donut shops (insert Baptist preacher joke here).\u00a0 I recently discovered that one of the shops\u00a0is owned and operated by a Buddhist.\u00a0 When you\u00a0enter\u00a0the store, there is a\u00a0small\u00a0statue of Buddha\u00a0sitting on the counter.\u00a0 Should that influence my decision to walk into the donut shop?\u00a0 Should I\u00a0stop\u00a0buying donuts\u00a0at this location\u00a0simply because a\u00a0Buddhist is the owner?<\/p>\n

If you learned that your favorite restaurant was owned by a conservative, pro-life\u00a0Republican, would you be more likely or less likely to eat there?\u00a0 If you discovered that the Bed and Breakfast that you and your wife get away to every year was managed by a nice liberal, pro-choice Democrat couple, would it influence whether you booked a return trip?\u00a0 If your child’s pediatrician turned out to be Christian or Jewish or Muslim, would you look for a new doctor?<\/p>\n

We live in a pluralistic society, with a diversity unmatched by any other country in the world.\u00a0 Every day, we have choices to make in\u00a0where we shop and how we spend our\u00a0money.\u00a0 Some of our everyday choices are trivial, but others\u00a0will have\u00a0long-lasting consequences.\u00a0 How do you decide who gets your hard-earned money?\u00a0 I’d love to hear your answers to that question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anti-Semites have added a new player to their team.\u00a0 More accurately, he was probably\u00a0already on the team, but most people outside of Hollywood did not know it.\u00a0 I speak of Oliver Stone, the film director who recently outed himself as a raging anti-Semite during an interview with The Sunday Times of London.\u00a0 This revelation should…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-51","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}