There’s nothing quite like a national awards show to remind me about the beautiful, liberal bubble of reason I inhabit. After a night that I only knew about in retrospect, America is evidently appalled by the semi quasi sorta- lewd performance of American Idol alum, Adam Lambert.

So this guy, rockin the guyliner and enough hair product to get a goat into a beauty pageant, sings some god-awful song at the American Music Awards. He is accompanied by a slew of scantily clad, very limber dancers with whom he interacts. He drags a woman by her foot, he has a male give him a fake-out fully clothed BJ from nearly a foot away, he sort of kind of humps at people and he French kisses a dude.

Now you and I, being reasonable people, and people with access to media from the last 50 years, know this is not outrageous. We know this is the standard (albeit tawdry) fair we’ve come to expect from our pop music acts. We demand nothing less than soft core porn with very thin women accompanied by an 808.

But evidently somewhere in American, somewhere that I suspect has a Walmart nearby, people went, “Holy Shit, Let’s Freak Out.” ABC got a ton of complaints about a performance that had taken place at the very end of the show, the time when kids shouldn’t be watching TV. If your kid was home at that time and watching that garbage, they’re clearly lame anyway and might benefit from seeing some faux-gay action.

Twitter was ablaze, naturally, with even such randoms as Marlee Matlin making it known she’s a GLAMBERT in favor of freedom. Good Morning America canceled his scheduled gig but Lambert isn’t close to apologizing. He rightly points out that female pop stars do this kind of crap all the time.

Uh, yeah. Over 15 years ago Janet Jackson did the same fake-out oral sex move on a dancer for her song, If, which, if any of the outraged viewers had memories longer than 10 minutes would recall she performed EARLIER IN THE SAME AMA SHOW.

But as you probably recall, Janet too has felt the crazy-eyed retribution of the part of the country that clearly sucks. After Nipplegate, they came at her with the vengeance only possible from a steady diet of Sam’s Choice Cola and ignorant, self-serving Biblical interpretations, padded by apathy about actually parenting their children.

But what is missing from their outrage is the thing that should actually be causing the uproar: his performance was awful. His off-key, grating warbles did nothing for an obviously terrible song. But he’s got the world atwitter about his forthcoming CD and really, that’s all that matters.

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