GoDaddy's Superbowl ad, censorship, & Bonhoeffer...

Joe Carter reported that the owner of GoDaddy.com, Bob Parsons, is also the founder of Parsons Church Software. GoDaddy's Superbowl ad, in which a buxom female is shown before a Senate hearing on censorship, has (intentionally) generated quite a stir for its apparent raciness as well as its lack of ingenuity. Interestingly enough, the NFL and Fox pulled the ad from airing a second time during the game. Joe references an interview that Randy Townley had with Craig Rairdin, who actually wrote the original code for Quick Verse, the software that Parsons bought and marketed. Rairdin seems to think that the controversy regarding the GoDaddy spot is much ado about nothing. In fact, he thinks that the real issue is that the second spot was pulled, or - censored. He stated,

"I saw an article at WorldNetDaily.com that intimated some kind of hypocrisy in the airing of the GoDaddy Super Bowl ad, but it didn't really make its point very well. In fact, it indicated that Parsons didn't allow the ad agency to take the ad in the direction of lampooning 'religious fundamentalists' but instead they piloried network censors -- a good move on their part since it was the NFL and Fox who ended up censoring the parody on censorship, not religious groups."

Also from the interview,

Rairdin doesn't believe the commercial is racy, gratuitous, or anything other than great parody. "People have a hard time comprehending parody," Rairdin says "It's too sophisticated. They focus on the means and not on the end. They can't get past the real objects that are standing in for the parodied objects. That's why they object to a broken strap but miss the frightening implications of Fox's action in pulling GoDaddy's second ad -- the very subject being parodied by the ad." He raises an interesting point that I believe has been missed in all this discussion. But I don't believe the ad lacks raciness. In fact, Parson's comment to the ad-agency executive Paul Capelli seemed quite disturbing to many people "I would love to have a beautiful woman with a nice ample chest with my company name across her shirt." ..."GoDaddy hoped to take advantage of this lack of [parody] sophistication on the part of some viewers, who saw it as only a 'T&A' show. But then, Shakespeare played to the cheap seats as well as the cushioned ones. A penny's a penny." He continues "I really think more attention should be paid to the NFL and Fox. Their hypocrisy in pulling the second GoDaddy ad is offensively blatant. Ironically, the Simpson's commercial they played in its place featured Homer taking off his shirt, putting it between his legs, and imitating a male stripper -- all the while revealing that his pants didn't quite come high enough to cover his posterior. Again, more skin on Fox's 'family friendly' Simpsons ad than on the 'racy' GoDaddy ad." ...In response to criticism from other Christians concerning his connections with QuickVerse, Parsons said "To this day I consider myself a Christian, but I am not a fundamentalist Christian. I am also not a member of the religious right. I am not opposed in anyway to these groups. I am just not part of them. My beliefs today are exactly what they were back when I owned Parsons Technology. I'm still the same guy."

So the real villians here are the fundamentalist Christians and the religious right, clueless to the concept of parody; and especially the NFL and Fox, for their hypocrisy and blatant acts of censorship. In the 1930s, a Lutheran pastor named Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a radio address in which he exhorted the youth of the Germany to question the idea of having a Fuhrer. While he was able to continue his address, the Nazi government cut the radio transmission, replacing it with dinner music. Now that's censorship. Apparently, the likes of Rairdin and Parsons have a hard time comprehending real censorship. It's too sophisticated for them. That's why they can't get past those dollar signs in front of their eyes. That's why they object to any policing of their self-serving actions while missing the real issue of their pandering to the base aspects of secular culture.