Most tasteless memorial to Michael Jackson

moar funny pictures

I didn’t come up with this one. I’ve been toying with the idea of popping it up as a quick post for several days. I heard on NPR that Michael Jackson had been found in his rented mansion not breathing and that he had been taken to the hospital and was in a coma. I didn’t buy the story. When someone is found not breathing they usually are gone and by the time the EMTs arrive they are seriously dead. But the EMTs will go through the motions until they get the body to a hospital for a doctor to pronounce death.

With all his money, Michael Jackson could not buy happiness, although happiness actually IS for sale now and is surprisingly affordable. I’ll be posting on where to shop for it in a week or so.

I do believe Michael was a child molester, but from the little I know about his life he never got to be a child himself and was treated harshly, to put it mildly. On top of that, I believe a cruel and rigid religion that invalidated him as a gay man able to mature in his own sexuality — which is the only way anyone matures — thereby foreclosed his chances of figuring out how to become the genuinely good man I suspect he wanted to be.

I do not condone any of the bad things Michael Jackson did and I won’t play his music or buy his albums. However, weighing the atrocities committed against Jackson versus the ones he committed, I find they are two sides of the same coin. Forced heterosexuality does more harm than good. And the man was abused himself as a child, emotionally and physically. I never thought I would feel this way, but I pray for Michael’s soul to forgive and be forgiven and to be cradled and comforted like the child he never got to be in the bosom of a loving God.

P.S.

Instapundit has more on the false hope that a home defibrillator could have saved Michael Jackson’s life. Brain damage starts four or five minutes after the heart stops because the brain is deprived of oxygen when the heart isn’t pumping to circulate the blood. That is an extremely small window of opportunity and it was probably shut by the time Jackson’s body was discovered and definitely shut by the time the EMTs arrived.

P.P.S.

Michelle Malkin also has compassion for Michael Jackson here.

P.P.P.S.

I was wrong about never being able to enjoy Michael Jackson’s music again. Recently I wrote how important the music of Cris Williamson and Meg Christian was to me personally in building my courage to be a lesbian in the 1970’s when that was far more dangerous than it is now. The people of Iran protesting the election fraud and fighting for their freedom have redeemed Michael Jackson’s music for me. Gateway Pundit has the story and YouTube video that they have adopted Michael Jackson’s song “Beat It” as their anthem.

Update, 6/28/2009: Writer Ian Halperin has an extensively researched story in the Mail Online (from the Daily Mail newspaper in the U.K.) on Michael Jackson. He reports Jackson was gay, but not a child molester:

I had started my investigation convinced that Jackson was guilty [of child molestation]. By the end, I no longer believed that.

I could not find a single shred of evidence suggesting that Jackson had molested a child. But I found significant evidence demonstrating that most, if not all, of his accusers lacked credibility and were motivated primarily by money.

Jackson also deserved much of the blame, of course. Continuing to share a bed with children even after the suspicions surfaced bordered on criminal stupidity.

He was also playing a truly dangerous game. It is clear to me that Michael was homosexual and that his taste was for young men, albeit not as young as Jordan Chandler or Gavin Arvizo.

In the course of my investigations, I spoke to two of his gay lovers, one a Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor. The waiter had remained friends, perhaps more, with the singer until his death last week. He had served Jackson at a restaurant, Jackson made his interest plain and the two slept together the following night. According to the waiter, Jackson fell in love.

The actor, who has been given solid but uninspiring film parts, saw Jackson in the middle of 2007. He told me they had spent nearly every night together during their affair – an easy claim to make, you might think. But this lover produced corroboration in the form of photographs of the two of them together, and a witness.

Other witnesses speak of strings of young men visiting his house at all hours, even in the period of his decline. Some stayed overnight.

When Jackson lived in Las Vegas, one of his closest aides told how he would sneak off to a ‘grungy, rat-infested’ motel – often dressed as a woman to disguise his identity – to meet a male construction worker he had fallen in love with.

I am quoting this story because it clears Jackson of the suspicions of child molestation and also because it definitively states he was gay. I believe Jackson is an example of the torture gays endure due to being unequal in terms of civil rights and deliberately stigmatized for a being crime by religions. He also is an example of how that torture twists people instead of making them straight. Because Jackson became famous so young, and was a member of a church that disfellowships members who TALK to homosexuals (Margaret’s sister belongs to this religion), he had to hide his sexual orientation or risk losing his fame, fortune and family. To feel trapped into having to live a life divided and thwarted like that and constantly fearful of discovery is more painful than I can describe. It’s no wonder he took so many pain medications.