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So here’s a question: which of these items represents a greater threat to the moral character of our society? Should we be more concerned with a) some marginally talented celebrities displaying their genitalia along with poor judgment and sub-par intelligence, or b) a video game marketed to youth that promotes murdering people that don’t accept their fundamentalist religion, a Christianity that distorts the meaning of Scripture?
While I'm not one to usually disagree with Bob (and if you're familiar with his blog at all, you'd know how he'd vote), it's so funny how far Brithey's star has truly fallen; I remember once she was the "It" girl - the kind of person you'd use see posted up on every guy's wall, the one girl who'd be on every guy's mind, and the universal question on every guy's mind concerning her was "Like, yeah, who wouldn't want to tap that!?" - and now? Well, given the company she's keeping, I don't think I need to spell it out...
Three Stooges 2.0?
Such is the state of our society that a sex goddess has now become a laughing stock. And in some sense, I feel a genuine sense of empathy for someone like her. When you really think about it, a unique set of specific circumstances led to her being where she is now (underwear notwithstanding), and who's to say that if we went back in time and let the whole thing play out again that things would end up the same? Maybe it would be you in those pictures, and not her?
Walking around in Toronto, seeing so many poor and homeless people out on the streets made me think so much about how I got to where I am and how they got to where they got. For every homeless person there's a story to be told behind that homelessness and somewhere, at some point along the line each of those people was someone's cherished baby - just like Spears.
The point I'm trying to make is that at our very core, we really don't have a whole lot of things that separate us from each other, apart from material goods. In the end, we are all children of God, and well belong to the earth from which we came. I as a graduate student going to university, descended from immigrant parents actually have so much in common with you, dear reader, with an oft-ridiculed young feminine performer of dubious talent, a homeless person in a great big Canadian city, and...yes, even this man...
...We often think our legal system is able not just to judge a person’s guilt or innocence, but their soul as well. The theological argument is that governments are acting as God’s agents on earth, and when judges impose a sentence they are meting out God’s own justice. Thus, God is on our side, and we are free to judge as harshly as we see fit.
Bunk.
No legal system can judge a person’s soul and deliver the punishment they truly deserve, nor the grace they truly deserve. Jesus tells us that we aren’t to judge others, but are to leave judgment in God’s hands. What our justice system can do, and do well, is to deter crime. By imposing consequences on criminal behavior, we create a disincentive for those behaviors, and hopefully dramatically reduce their frequency. The purpose of these deterrents is to protect our selves, our families, and our property, but not to deliver judgment in God’s stead. If we are truly to follow Jesus’ commands, we should forgive, and even love, the sex offender even as we sentence them to prison for their actions. There is no conflict between the forgiveness and the punishment - we do what we have to do to protect society, all the while recognizing that redemption is available even to the child molester.
Bob chose to juxtapose Spears with the Left Behind game, which I really can't say any more about other than I already have (I mean, this sort of thing speaks for itself), but I think it's more fair to compare Spears to Miletti. Both are people who rank on very different levels of what society has deemed anaethema, and both are deserving of our acceptance and compassion. We can boo and hiss at Miletti all we want (and we can point and laugh at Spears while we're at it), but at the end of the day, we're simply all one and the same.
*Yes, this is about Britney Spears' infamous and intentional upskirt/sans-underwear shots. No, I'm not going to post a link to them because, while I'm just as much an admirer of the female body as much as the next guy, there are lines, nay, unholy lines that just shouldn't be crossed, and man - even hearing about it happen makes me want to scrub and rinse my brain out with steel wool and holy water.
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