Mel Gibson -- Good Actor, Likable Guy and Bigot

"A drunk man's words are a sober man's thoughts."

While that old proverb is simplistic, it does illustrate that inebriation does not tend to create entirely new facets of the drinker's personality.

As such, actor, director, producer and generally likable guy Mel Gibson gets zero traction when he suggests that there is no significance to his anti-Semitic tirade in the wee hours of Friday morning during a California drunken driving arrest.

Between escape attempts, he apparently blurted out a choice morsel of historical analysis: "The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world!" This was just before asking whether the arresting officer was, in fact, a Jew. Many of his references to Jews apparently were adorned with an f-word modifier.

He can be thankful that we are a forgiving society and even more grateful that our attention span probably has never been shorter. For those reasons, this is probably not a career ender.

But a couple of other things are out the window. First, there's that aforementioned mantle of universal likability, which propelled him through fun romps like the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies into meatier fare like Braveheart and The Patriot and romantic leading roles like What Women Want.

The other farewell is to the presumption of innocence that had been due him amid accusations of religious bigotry. I can't speak for everyone, but I had a lot of company in defending Mr. Gibson against charges that he villainized the Jews of Jesus' day with a certain intentional relish in The Passion of the Christ, a movie that doesn't have a shred of anti-Semitism in it unless one projects it through glasses colored with a distaste for its director.

Now those glasses have been mass-produced and taint any objective evaluation of one of Hollywood's most bankable stars. While this in no way rises to the impact of discovering a hate streak in a high government official, it is disillusioning and, if nothing else, noteworthy for its rarity.

Usually bigots do us the favor of being all-around objectionable souls, sparing us the parsing of their pluses and minuses to separate the wheat from the chaff of their sorry personalities. No one cared whether David Duke loved his dog.

But here we have a case of despicable words issuing not from the mouth of some familiar bug-eyed hatemonger but from one of the most affable stars in recent show business history.

What do we do with that? This is not a Dixie Chick moment of political hate speech born of stupidity. This is raw, unadulterated anti-Semitism, bubbling to the surface on the crest of a moderate blood alcohol level - so much for the excuse that Mel was so blitzed that he is not to be held responsible for his uncivil tongue.

Now he wants us to know two things - that he continues to battle alcoholism and that he has, in fact, entered rehab. Let us wish him well with that while staying focused on its complete irrelevancy. Alcoholism does a lot of things, but it does not plant a seed of religious intolerance where there was none.

So were the critics during the Passion uproar right? Is Mr. Gibson an unenlightened acorn who fell very near the Jew-hating tree that is his father?

Hutton Gibson, a member of an ultraradical wing of Catholicism called sedevacantism, believes that Jews were part of a conspiracy to water down his church's liturgical practices. This steamed him sufficiently to sign onto some other planks in the hate platform, like the old favorite that the Holocaust is mostly fiction.

Peppered by accusations that he had not escaped the penumbra of his father's lunacy, Mr. Gibson told interviewers during the Passion media tour that his faith teaches that anti-Semitism is a sin. He repeated in a Tuesday statement that he does not harbor such feelings.

Well, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that Mr. Gibson is lying to himself and to us. Yes, he is an anti-Semite. He has not poisoned his public life or his work with these dark views, but they are in his mind and his heart, and that is very sad.

The good news is that repentance is always possible, and, in the Gibson case, we may have a sinner capable of recognizing his error and sincerely seeking to make it right. He has asked Jewish leaders to help him with his alcohol problem, but it is not a rabbi's job to keep Mr. Gibson off the bottle. He needs to ask Jewish people for help in his journey to enlightenment, not sobriety.

In both cases, his first step is to admit the problem.