Sunday night’s Academy Awards proved that we’ve come a long way in the so-called culture wars. There was a time when Clint Eastwood cut the cloth of the perfect liberal boogeyman. In 1971, The New York Times film critic Pauline Kael famously called Dirty Harry a “medieval fascist” for his unrepentant pursuit of vigilante justice. Eastwood’s characters saw the world in Manichean terms, and his movies’ plots were simple-minded conflicts of Good vs. Evil — a storyline the Bush Administration is fond of imposing on real world conflicts.

Fast-forward to 2005, and Eastwood — a lifelong Republican — has become the bête noir of conservative pundits like Michael Medved and Rush Limbaugh, as well as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has called Eastwood’s Oscar-winning Million Dollar Baby “morally offensive.” The film’s “permissive depiction of euthanasia,” the USCCB claims, “will leave Catholic viewers emotionally against the ropes.”

Now, I don’t claim to know why Catholic bishops watch movies, but I do know that great art does occasionally challenge our ethical and moral sensibilities. Oedipus Rex, for instance, involves the prickly issues of patricide and incest. Same goes for a lot of Shakespeare’s work, which could be skewered by twenty-first century Republicans for portraying for all kinds of acquaintance-assisted suicide.

None of this matters, of course, if you are the moral arbiter of all that is good and just in America like Wall Street Journal columnist Michael Medved, who spoiled the plot of the movie because, as he claims, “There are competing moral demands that come into the job of a movie critic. We have a moral and fairness obligation to not spoil movies. On the other hand, our primary moral obligation is to tell the truth.”

The truth being, evidently, that Dirty Harry has become a puppet of liberal Hollywood.

Still, this self-righteousness is nothing compared to News Max columnist Ted Baehr, who called Million Dollar Baby a “neo-Nazi movie.”

Take that, Pauline Kael!

What the controversy over Million Dollar Baby really underscores, though, is a paradox in the ascendancy of the Religious Right since the last election. While religious conservatives from James Dobson to Jerry Falwell have amped up their cultural critique of everything from the Super Bowl to SpongeBob, they have yet to accomplish one single victory in culture wars. The sound and fury of the Religious Right may get rural voters in Alabama to the polls in November, but let’s face the facts: Religious conservatives are never going to change popular culture.

That’s because, as Thomas Frank demonstrates in What’s the Matter with Kansas , they’ve built an entire political strategy based on false martyrdom. As Frank writes:

[The Religious Right’s] voters toss a few liberals out of office and Hollywood doesn’t change …They return an entire phalanx of pro-business blowhards to Washington and still the culture industry goes on its merry way. But at least those backlash politicians that they elect are willing to do one thing differently: They stand there are on the floor of the U.S. Senate and shout no to it all.

Still, as the 2005 Academy Awards proved, Americans — even those who consider themselves apolitical — love to watch transgression. The transgression may be sexual (e.g. ABC’s Desperate Housewives or HBO’s Sex and the City) or moral (e.g. Million Dollar Baby) — sometimes it may even be a conflation of the two — but it always appeals to viewers across the aisle. In fact, it’s only when the transgression is overtly political, as in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, that the culture industry gets cold feet.

Right-wing politicians and pundits who think a Republican-dominated Congress and second Bush Administration will change the tenor of Hollywood or prime time TV are either self-deluded or using rhetoric to manipulate their religious base. The latter is more likely since Republican presidents since Ronald Reagan have been chirping on about “moral values,” only to spend all of their political capital on economic policies like tax cuts and Social Security privatization.

Next time a conservative Republican politician pledges to clean up the crassness of American culture or some such nonsense, someone in the media — just for once — should stand up and say: “Go ahead, make my day!”

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Russell Cobb, InTheFray Assistant Managing Editor

Russell Cobb