The War on Hugs

I must interrupt this Movie-a-Day month to do what I do best - mock the religious. Oh, settle down, I'm not mocking all of you. In fact, I'm sure that many of you will find this to be just as absurd as I do. In fact, I feel pretty sorry for all of the sensible religious people I know, as this no doubt makes you want to hang your head in shame.

Apparently, hugs are bad. That's right. There's a YouTube video that's currently going viral where a bunch of wannabe gangster "rough rider" Christians are extolling the virtues of the "Christian side hug". They even go so far as to claim that Jesus "never hugged nobody" with the standard front-to-front hugging style. (Which Gospel is that in again?) I guess the problem is that if you're a fella, your member might rub up against the girl (or even worse - boy!) you're hugging, and then you'll get all stiff-in-the-pants, which will want to make you get naked with that girl (or even worse - that boy!) and make whoopee.

I don't know what makes me sadder about this video. As a friend (Nolan) pointed out, if you were to parody it, what exactly would you change? You already have a bunch of white kids acting all gangster and trying to make gang signs. That's bad enough. I'm also pretty sure that they don't know what they're saying when they call themselves "rough riders". I'm not sure what they're saying either, but that doesn't exactly ring out as something pure and innocent, does it?

That aside, who the hell came up with this? How perverted do you need to be to not trust yourself to give somebody a hug? And why all this fear of getting turned on? Why can't we just acknowledge that we get turned on by one another sometimes, and if we didn't, there wouldn't even be a human race. If these Christians really think that this is something that will curb teenage pregnancy, then they're fooling themselves. That's not surprising, as the last I checked, these fundamentalist types are having just as much sex as the secular ones - only they use protection less often.

Am I the only one who remembers what it was like to be a teenage boy? Did hugs from pretty girls get me excited? Hell yes. Would a side hug do the same thing? Hell yes. Shoot, a girl could barely touch me and my mind was filled with "impure" thoughts. She just had to look at me. She just had to look somewhere in my general direction. I just had to imagine that maybe she might consider looking in my general direction.

The thing is, the hug is one of the most basic ways that humans show affection for one another. It builds bonds between us, and it provides comfort and solace when we need it the most. And then these people have to go and screw that up.

Here's the video in question. Try not to vomit: