Being a Good Example (of Christian Arrogance and Judgementalism) and the MTV Video Music Awards

In America, people wear "promise rings" which don't mean they are promising to marry someone, but rather that they have pledged to remain virginal until marriage.  It isn't enough to simply privately do this because you believe it to be good and right, but there has to, for some reason, be a solemnization of it and an outward show made of doing it.  

    What's my problem with that?  The solemnization and outward show.  That reeks of pride.   The Jonas Brothers wear their rings and talk about what they are doing, quite contrary to Jesus' teaching that when one does something which could gain one piety points, such as praying or giving to charity, that it is to be done privately, the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, rather than advertising it around.  The Pharisees of his day got people to ring bells in front of them when they stopped in the street to pray, ostensibly because they needed to be able to pray at a moment's notice, but also to get everyone's attention drawn to their public display of piety by disrupting the flow of traffic in an area filled with honest, working folk who were meant to admire this piety, but who no doubt were just annoyed by the holdup and the bragging.  Jesus said these sort of people "have their reward" by which I understand him to mean that the reward is a present pious appearance, and not efficacy, being heard by God, reward later in Heaven or anything like that. 

     So, the Jonas Brothers are on MTV, with girls swooning over this, and Russell Brand, recovered junkie and self-confessed sex addict from Britain, is hired to make jokes about the people and things on the show.  Naturally, as a sex addict, he was very interested in the Jonas Brothers and their highly publicized purity, and so he made some jokes.  Quite a few, actually.  

    He said they were able to sleep with any woman they wanted, and chose not to, which was like Superman refusing to fly and taking the bus to get around.  This is not a disrespectful comment.  Then he produced a ring later in the show and said that he'd just personally taken one of the Jonas Brothers' virginity.  This was, of course, rude and disrespectful, but really rather funny, one must admit.   He was hired to stand there and be amusingly coarse and disrespectful, but many felt he'd Gone Too Far.  

    You can do what you like, but you can't joke about American religion and foreign policy.  Not being able to joke about something is proof positive that you lack a sense of perspective regarding it.  He apologized later in the show, but even Americans who have a great deal of pre and extra-marital sex were up in arms over his mockery.  How dare he stand on the very American soil which the Dixie Chicks weren't standing on when they exercised their free speech, and mock?  (Especially when he comes from the very place the Chicks were when they mocked the president of the U.S., and so he clearly, to the YouTuber's view, has no right to an opinion, nor possesses a perspective worth considering.) 

    Jordin Sparks, no doubt a terribly important person from American Idol I think, having no trouble with trying to be an idol, nevertheless "as a Christian woman" was upset at Brand's comments about promise rings, because she wears one.  She revealed her arrogance and contempt for people living any way other than her own, and her unchristian delight in offhandedly judging millions of people she doesn't even know when she said "promise rings are okay because not every guy and girl needs to be a slut."   

     Teasing three guys for their attempts to show off about and derive fame from their sexual chastity is apparently unforgivably horrible, but calling every single young person in America not wearing a promise ring "a slut" is just fine, apparently.  (I tried to get the exact quotation from her MySpace, where I'd have never, ever gone if I'd remembered that going there would mean that I'd have to listen to her in the very act of disgorging the insipid outpourings of rancid vole vomit she calls music.  Now I can never again be ignorant of what she sounds like, or what she looks like when her thighs have been badly Photoshopped either).  

     Thankfully everyone will have forgotten how important she actually is in a few months. Brand also ensured the success of his American career by saying that in the UK, no one would trust "retarded cowboy" George W. Bush with a pair of scissors, let along vote him into the Oval Office.  Go Russell.  Keep on reminding people what the job of a jester, clown or fool actually is.