«Is it enough, though? Or is it just a start?»
Washington Post opinion writer Alyssa Rosenburg has a piece up today titled “Kevin Hart’s homophobia caught up with him. Is losing the Oscars enough?” I don’t assume she wrote the headline but that’s a pretty fair summary of the piece itself which argues that Hart’s past statements about homosexuals should cost him more than a lost gig. In fact, the headline softens it a bit by making it a question. Rosenburg asks that question in the piece and then clearly answers it by saying Hart should pay some kind of additional ‘penance’ for his bad tweets:
If Hart thought that telling Rolling Stone in 2015 that “I think we love to make big deals out of things that aren’t necessarily big deals, because we can” was enough to put that phase of his career to rest, he seems to have been disabused of that notion. Saying, as he did Friday, that “I’m sorry that I hurt people.. I am evolving and want to continue to do so. My goal is to bring people together not tear us apart” is closer to the mark.
Is it enough, though? Or is it just a start? The concept of penance may be out of fashion, but that should change, especially at a moment of national reckoning over homophobia, sexual violence and racism.
