Ultra-orthodox CatholicMel Gibson’s family values: conservative until it hits home

Holy Week ended with a big bang in the conservative Catholic community. Robyn Moore, Mel Gibson’s wife of 28 years and mother of their seven children, filed for divorce in Los Angeles. With no prenuptial agreement, she is likely to get a settlement worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. Seems like a small price for 28 years of living with Mad Max and his homophobia, anti-Semitism and ultra-orthodox Catholicism.

In a joint statement, the couple acknowledge that they separated in August 2006 shortly after Gibson was arrested for drunk driving. When he was arrested Gibson publicly humiliated his family by engaging in a drunken tirade claiming that the Jews started all the wars in the world and asking a female police sergeant who was filming the event, “What are you looking at, sugar tits.”

But the tipping point that led Moore to seek a divorce seems to have been the publication of photos and stories about Gibson cavorting on a Costa Rican beach with an unidentified young woman. A Russian pop idol named Oksana says she’s the one and Gibson has asked her to marry him. Others claim the woman on the beach was a different Oksana, 39-year-old Ukrainian singer Oksana Grigorieva, who lives in a house owned by the CFO of Gibson’s production company Icon and is the former girlfriend of Timothy Dalton.

Why is it that these right-wing family-values guys are always the worst sinners? Newt Gingrich, Ted Hagee, Larry Craig and now Mel Gibson. Gibson was quoted in the Observer in 2000 as having said, “There is nothing more important than your family. If you ruin that part of your life, what’s left? Work? Money? Screwing around?