I'd heard complaints about the length of the scourging sequence before I saw the film so I deliberately timed it. It's ten minutes long, not thirty as Morford claims, and significant parts of that ten minutes are taken up in either flashbacks or a test of wills among the Roman soldiers about how the scourging should proceed.
Morford's dishonesty is not surprising. Like Michael Moore, Michaelangelo Signorile, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, the gang at DU, and so many more on the left, he uses dishonesty as a standard tool of his polemics, and so helps me remember, whenever I get little less than enthusiastic about the standard of argumentation here on the right, that the alternative is far worse.
Guys like Mark Morford help me remember what I am not, and, please God, what I will never be.
Honest open talk about Christianity makes liberals nervous, because it threatens their power base. They believe that they are the only ones who can truely help the needy and the downtrodden. So they had a vested interest in keeping people away from this film. So they made up lies to get people to avoid it. First it was anti-semitism. Then, when not one single act was carried out against Jews, they switched to focusing on the violence. I know a lot of Christians who have avoided this film because they are afraid that it is too violent. It is, in fact, less violent than a lot of films that I can name. And if you read the Gospel, you know that none of this violence is gratuitous.