religionlulz

Some time ago I went through a phase of listening to christian radio for a couple of months. It gave me an amazing insight into just how batshit crazy these evangelicals can be, but ultimately I had to break away from it for the sake of my own sanity.

I don't know how typical it is, but the station I listened to basically just ran half hour syndicated shows in a regular programme. One of my favourite shows each morning was the Focus on the Family show with the massive, massive fucktard, James Dobson. A man who apparently has a PhD in child psychology, yet believes that homosexuality is a choice and something that can be "cured".

I regularly enjoyed his rages about impending anti-hate speech bills that would prevent his religious ilk preaching their bile and hate towards whichever minority group they think they can get away with. My point being that their anti-gay rhetoric sounds exactly the same as their anti-race and sex equality arguments of the past.

Without a hint of irony, he would demand tolerance towards the christian right wing's desire to be intolerant. Seriously. In his mind, anyone who wishes to shut down bigoted, intolerant bullshit is being intolerant themselves. So presumably we should all have the right to run around saying whatever we like, no matter how vile or dangerous, just so long as it isn't anything derogatory about the christian faith. That would be outrageous, natch.

Anyhoo, I digress. One of the last shows I had the pleasure of listening to was an interview with Carrie Prejean, the pagent girl who captured the headlines for publicly stating her opposition to gay marriage. (As a quick sidebar: for me, nothing she said was particularly controversial. She was asked a question, probably a leading one, and she gave an answer. She didn't try to attack anyone, although I'm not suggesting that prefacing any statement with "no offense" qualifies. But honestly, I could give two shits what she thinks and wonder why anyone would care what a beauty queen thinks about issues of social justice and equality).



It may well be that most people feel like I do and it was actually the religious right that rallied around her to protect her from the inevitable attacks from the biased liberal media that were never really there and they, themselves created any controversy. I don't know, who cares?

James Dobson wanted to elevate her to the position of poster child for their right to discriminate and a example of how the secular media attack their side. During the interview, they spent time going over how the media went after her and would continue to do so. Making her life a misery in the process while she tried to milk her 15 minutes of fame for every fucking cent she could.

What Dobson and his cohorts don't understand is that the rest of us, outside of their little religious bubble, do not care to be preached to about what is morally right or wrong. We don't recognise any authority in their silly little bible, so there's no point poking in our face and telling us that we're doing it wrong.

However, one thing worse than a sanctimonious, self righteous, pious arsehole preaching morality to others is a hypocritical, sanctimonious, self righteous, pious arsehole preaching morality to others. And isn't it amazing how many of them turn out to be hypocrites?

So I really didn't give a fuck when it was discovered that Prejean had posed for some photographs of a more salacious nature, she walked around in similar attire during a beauty contest, although, in fairness, the photos are somewhat more provocative than the average pageant. The only problem comes from the hypocrisy of someone representing themselves as somehow morally superior to others, but engaging in conduct they would consider questionable themselves.

Still, when the photos surfaced, I heard Dobson rationalize their existence and tried to accuse the media of being the hypocrites. Basically, his argument is that this sort of semi-nude stuff is prevalent in the secular world, so it's hypocritical to criticize Prejean for indulging. He simply does not get, or chooses not to get, that she's primarily on the wrong end of any criticism because she's set herself up as being morally superior to the rest of us, but has been found out to be the same. If she kept her gob shut, she'd be just another reasonably hot chick showing off some skin.

Now, you can file this firmly under "you couldn't make this shit up", but apparently a video has surfaced of Prejean playing a bit of the old vagina DJ!! Yup, you read that correctly... apparently the young lady who thinks she's on some moral mission from god to tell us who should and shouldn't be able to get married has no problem with doing the taco handshake on camera!! LAWL!!!!!!!

You can read the back story at TMZ, but in a nutshell, she's been pursuing a lawsuit against the Miss California organization for something or other to the tune of a million bucks. Apparently, they've had this video in their possession for a while but didn't really want to use it. Eventually they showed the tape to Prejean and her lawyer and she initially denied it was her until her face was shown in frame. She then conferred with her legal team for 15 seconds and promptly dropped her case!!

When I learned of this story I was immediately curious what Dobson thought, so I headed to his Focus on the Family website, but can you believe it doesn't get a mention?!? Strange that, I think he needs to get in that news department and get the whip cracking!!

On a serious note, if he addresses this at all during the radio show, I would fully expect him to point the finger of blame squarely towards any and all non-christians, probably squirming around to find some way to square the circle in the process.

As far as I can tell, Dobson has no issue with masturbation, so Prejean is in the clear there and that may well be the way Dobson rationalizes it. However, surely as soon as a camera is introduced it becomes pornography and Dobson is very well documented in his opposition towards porn.

I'm not sure what I find more lulzy about this development - the story itself, or the likes of Dobson squirming as they work out how to rationalize this. In all likelihood, they'll simply drop Prejean like a hot potato and pretend they never hitched any wagons to her.