07/01/2007

Wishing for blinders in checkout line

By Kathy Gibbons
Features editor
kgibbons@
record-eagle.com

Read Kathy's past columns here

I have always had a strong sense of right and wrong.

And I'm like an elephant; I don't forget. Like, I'm still mad at Iowa for tearing 2 ½-year-old Baby Jessica in Ann Arbor out of the arms of the only parents she'd ever known. She'd been given up for adoption by biological mom and then biological dad learned about it and they decided they wanted her after all — and that was, what, 14 years ago? Even now, if I had to go to Nebraska, I'd go around Iowa.

But that is why the canonization of Angelina Jolie is starting to get old. Everywhere you look — the talk shows and tons of magazine covers, which translates to every single grocery checkout line — there she is. Not coincidentally, her new movie just opened.

The stories are about her as earth mother. They detail her humanitarian efforts, which are actually quite impressive and largely under the radar. But suddenly she's St. Angelina.

Am I the only one who remembers that she made a movie with a man who, in short order, was getting a divorce amid speculation that she and he were a couple — which, in short order, they were?

Great, she has found happiness, along with a meaningful cause and maybe the love of her life. But can we bring it down a notch?

Take Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and now presidential candidate. Married, he was seeing another woman who is now his current wife, and his popularity was not particularly high when Sept. 11, 2001 came along and elevated his stature considerably. Like many people, I was impressed by his role in dealing with that tragedy.

But the public seems to have amnesia. Sure, people have a right to be happy. Yes, some wake up one day and realize they don't love their spouse anymore — don't we all know someone who has been on the giving or receiving end of that?

Yet there are honorable and dishonorable ways to get out of those marriages, and taking up with someone else while you are still married, or being a party to that, is the latter.

Without even trying, I can think of three women I know right off whose husbands announced out of the blue one day that they wanted out, just like that. There wasn't another woman, these men insisted; oh no, they just weren't happy anymore. Each time, I privately wondered when the other woman would bob to the surface, and in every instance, one did.

It's not that people — famous or not — don't deserve happiness. And some of us don't necessarily go about getting it in the best way.

But sainthood?

It's over the top.