Friday column: More than dumb, this defense is dumb-dumb

So.

Whoopie Goldberg doesn’t believe a 43-year-old man sodomizing a girl of 13 after giving her alcohol and drugs is rape.

Well, it’s rape, she said in explaining why Roman Polanski should not be extradited to the U.S., but not rape-rape, thereby somehow offering Polanski license for a crime he admitted to but for which he never paid.

The only way I can account for this interesting … um, thinking … is the fact that Polanski is a film director — you know, an artiste, and therefore not liable to the standards the rest of us proles are held to. That seemed to be the thrust of Debra Winger’s impassioned defense of Polanski — he’s an artist.

But then, he’s not that great of an artist, right? I mean, granted, he gave us Chinatown and The Pianist. But he also brought us The Fearless Vampire Killers and Pirates. Personally, I’m not sure I’d give the director of Bitter Moon a pass on jaywalking.

But that got my wife — the RISD and CalArts grad — and me to wonder: Using the reasoning of the Polanski defenders, what level of artist do you have to be to get a pass on a terrible crime against another human being?

Staying for comparison’s sake in a single category, painters, here’s what we came up with:

A Renior-level artist could commit crime.

A Jackson Pollock-level artist could commit crime-crime.

A Picasso-level artist could pretty much do anything he damn well pleased.

(A Dalí-level artist, on the other hand, could and should be arrested for spitting on the sidewalk.)

This Whoopie-and-Winger-inspired rating system could apply to athletes, as well. After all, they’re artists of a sort, aren’t they?

Kobe Bryant, I recall, was accused of rape — I don’t know if Ms. Goldberg considered it rape-rape or not — but he most certainly did something to that young Colorado hotel worker. Yet he walked without it costing him a little more than lawyers’ fees, settlement money and, of course, that nice, big rock for Mrs. Bryant.

With four NBA championships on his résumé, Bryant clearly is at or near the top of the basketball world, so whatever he did to the woman clearly should be covered by artistic license.

What about Ben Roethlisberger, the latest big-name athlete accused of rape?

On the one hand, the Steelers quarterback has won two Super Bowls. But on the other, he can’t be said to have reached Bryant’s level of accomplishment. So the precise level of violent sexual predation he should be allowed under the Whoopie-Winger system is unclear.

Now, if because of Roethlisberger’s unclear status, this method of determining who should get away with what seems inexact, it’s only as it should be. After all, the system isn’t science; it’s more, well, art.

Contact Jim Gordon at gjames43@msn.com.