EDITORIAL - Lady Gaga and Pacquiao

Religious groups were beside themselves with tripidation last week over the concert of Lady Gaga and tried unsuccessfully to pressure authorities to ban the concert. They feared the influence she might exert on the young.

Lady Gaga performances are sexually-laced and outrageous. But that is her draw, and the reason why, from an original single performance, organizers had to add a repeat due to insistent public demand.

But as these religious groups trained their firepower on Lady Gaga, they seemed to have forgotten the travails of their own “Bible Ambassador” Manny Pacquiao who is himself under fire from gays for utterances that were only partly his own doing.

Pacquiao was asked what he thought of US President Barrack Obama’s endorsement of same sex marriages, and the boxing icon merely said he was against it because it was against God’s teachings, or words to that effect.

But the author of the report added a quote from Leviticus to the effect that those who engage in sex with persons of the same sex should be put to death. The quote was misunderstood as having come from Pacquiao and now he is being crucified for something he did not actually say.

Yet no religious group has come to the aid of Pacquiao when all he did was express his own personal opinion, minus off course the wrong and malicious attribution. Pacquiao is free to express his opinion just as Obama was with his.

If gays are free to marry in some countries and in some US states, why should Pacquiao not be similarly free to express a mere opinion? Freedom works both ways and if Pacquiao ever erred, he only erred in being so many things all at the same time.

Any idea is always a springboard for a diversity of opinion and it is always better to have people talking than killing each other. Besides, a thousand Pacquiaos expressing a contrary opinion to same sex marriage means nothing if the world eventually comes to accept it.

The real wonder is not about Lady Gaga or gays getting their way in the world but about religious prudes who do not know what their real position is about. They hoot at the sexiness of Lady Gaga yet fail to defend the Church’s position as expressed by their own Bible ambassador.