Latest "Batman" Promotes Stigma and Intolerance

The Dark Knight. Have you seen it?

All right, you know the part where Harvey Dent has been roughing up one of the Joker's maniacally laughing henchmen (you know, the one that had Rachel's name on his nametag), and Batman shows up and explains to Harvey that the guy has been busted out of a hospital, that he's exactly the sort of freak that the Joker wants working for him because he's HIV positive and therefore sick, twisted and deviant?

Wait...what? It didn't happen like that!

Okay, maybe it happened like this: Batman shows up and explains to Harvey that the laughing maniac has been busted out of a hospital because he's blind and deaf and is therefore a sinful abomination before God and so, just the sort of freak that the Joker...

No, no, no! It didn't happen that way either! That's horrible, Lauren, how can you write that?

You've got me. What actually happened in the movie was that Batman identified the henchmen as being Joker-worthy because he was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic.

Ah! Well, that's perfectly all right, then. Because everybody knows that schizophrenics really are violent maniacs who love to kill people randomly. That's scientifically sound, unlike all that claptrap about people with HIV being twisted deviants or the physically handicapped being sinful abominations...right?

Umm...no.

Last night, I went to see The Dark Knight, the latest incarnation of Batman on the silver screen, and the aforementioned scene angered me so much that I nearly walked out of the theater. Wanna know why it was only "nearly"?

Because the movie was just that good. I've been a Batman fan since I was about five years old, and I adored this film. It was better than the first in this series, gritty and dramatic, grounded in reality, with superb writing. And the acting? Oh! I could rhapsodize for hours about how the late Heath Ledger's performance really does live up to all the hype, or how the always-brilliant Gary Oldman has made this incarnation of Commissioner Gordon into a character worth standing up and applauding, or why Christian Bale is the once and future Batman...