who values family values?

won’t somebody please think of the children?

that seems to be the rallying cry for all of the parental councils/advocacy groups/organizations in instituting their clean-cut, wholesome values… from the 1950’s.

these so-called “values”… what are they, anyway? one can only guess that they’re so out-of-date and unrealistic in today’s society that only the amish and a few tribes in papua new guinea would be able to follow them. do these “family values” apply to watching soldiers dying every day in iraq on the news? or the media onslaught of hearing how michael jackson invited kids to “sleep over”, and the parents that allowed it?

the latest uproar, over grand theft auto: san andreas, is little more than a bandwagon for political alarmists to jump onto. anyone familiar with the game (who the hell isn’t?) is more than aware of the total freedom allowed within its environment – but most notably the extreme violence (carjacking, murder, etc.) that it’s notorious for.

so what part of GTA:SA is making the news? maybe the fact that you can pull someone out of their car and beat them to death with a bat? that you can pick up a hooker, pay her, and then run over her with your car? that there are “rampage” minigames where you have to kill as many people within 2 minutes with an assault rifle? nope, it’s the fact that you can have sex in the game. scandalous.

to top it all off, it’s not even an official “feature” of the game. to get to the “hot coffee” scene in question, you have to download an unofficial game patch (written by some 16-year-old kid, no doubt) to unlock it.

it didn’t help that rockstar games, creator of the grand theft auto series, initially denied any wrongdoing. instead, they blamed it on “hackers”. the actual scene in the game has your character take a girl into a room, out of view, where you have no control. typical movie “pan-to-the-fireplace” scene, right? well, like it or not, the code was there, so all the patch does is unlock the camera and controls, and bingo! instant sex minigame.

of course this drew the attention of all the parental groups, which in turn became a hot election topic for the political opportunists hoping to gain a few conservative votes.

all of this for a game that’s already 9 months old. funny, where were they when the game was released? why are they so up-in-arms about a hidden scene that’s not normally accessible, when there’s tons of blood, gore, and violence right there in their faces? they seem so outraged, yet they bought the game for their kids when it came out in october. only now are they truly horrified by their own selective ignorance. if that’s not a perfect example of hypocrisy, then I don’t know what is.