Staten Island’s new Tackling Youth Substance Abuse program might be well-intentioned, but it got decidedly mean-spirited yesterday after Borough President James Molinaro took the stage at the kickoff event. The eighty-one-year-old was expected to outline the goals of the campaign and perhaps even talk about his own son’s saddening drug overdose in 2006. He accomplished those tasks but also took a left hand turn to shockingly accuse Lady Gaga of corrupting children and being a slut.
Molinaro’s righteous, old man anger was spurred by the pop star’s public smoking of marijuana during a recent concert in Amsterdam. To illustrate his point, he got his middle school English project on and pasted two large photographs of the incident beneath the caption “Stop Glorifying Drug Use In The Media”. He set the posterboard on a large stand next to him and proceeded to rant about the media giving musicians, actors and “ballplayers” free passes to engage in drug use.
Here’s how he concluded the portion of the diatribe specifically aimed at Gaga…
”To me, she's not an actress, she's a slut.”
Here’s what’s so incredibly stupid about this entire thing. I’m pretty sure an overwhelming majority of citizens would like teenagers to stop abusing substances. They’re maybe not so bothered by marijuana but definitely want no part of kids taking pills, coke, meth, etc. That’s a cause everyone can get behind, but by turning his speech into a poorly-researched middle finger at Lady Gaga, Molinaro made this a polarizing issue.
Newsflash: most people aren’t excited about hearing an old man call a young woman a slut. It’s judgmental. It’s stupid, and it’s unnecessary. And now, thanks to this rant, people are left to decide whether to support this good cause and and the d-bag behind it or say not to both.
