Friar Barnardine: Thou has committed—

Barabas: Fornication: but that was in another Barabas: Fornication: but that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead.

—Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta

The most melancholy saying of the late Irving Kristol, though probably as true as anything else he said, was that (as of the 1990s anyway) the culture war was over and we—meaning conservatives—had lost it. Though not enough to prove him wrong, it was something of an unction to the soul for that still-rankling loss that so few voices outside Hollywood, New York, and the international film fraternity were raised on behalf of Mr. Roman Polanski when he was arrested and held for extradition to the United States on his arrival in Switzerland to accept a lifetime achievement award. For at least a moment, it seemed as if it could be, after all, that the giants of the entertainment industry were as out of touch with the rest of America as we vanquished culture-warriors once used to think they were. Now again, for one brief shining moment, liberals and conservatives could feel united in their revulsion at Mr. Polanski’s behavior—the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, in case you didn’t know—even if it was thirty-three years in the past. “Could it be,” wrote the very liberal Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, “that the conservative culture warriors who portray Hollywood as a cesspool of moral bankruptcy have