This is what many people in the movie industry don't get: when you express hostility to conservatives, many Americans feel that you're expressing hostility to them.

For many celebrities, securing the publics votes can prove even more reassuring than winning an election by members of the Motion Picture Academy.

If we wait for the entertainment industry to change its fundamental values, we may be waiting a long time. But we don't have to wait another day to scale back our own private consumption of television.

It makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names.

Unfortunately our children today seem to spend less and less time with their overworked parents, and so they draw more information about the world from the images on movie and TV screens. The true power of the media is the ability to redefine reality, to alter our expectations about what constitutes normal life. TV and the movies have abused that power by advancing the notion that wholesome, ordinary happiness is impossible.

For many of the most powerful people in the entertainment business, hostility to organized religion goes so deep and burns so intensely that they insist on expressing that hostility, even at the risk of financial disaster.

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.