New craze: Hunting naked women

Editor's note: Jared Crooks is the editor of Business Reform Magazine, the world's leading Christian business magazine. Each issue features practical advice on operating successfully in business while glorifying God.

I'm rarely one to preach about the end of the world coming any time in the near future, but after reading Fox News' report on Las Vegas' latest craze, I'm seriously thinking about selling everything I own and finding shelter before the brimstone starts falling.

The name of the game is Hunting For Bambi and, although the very thought of detailing the rules of this "sport" makes my stomach turn, here's the gist: men gear up in camouflage, drive out to the desert, fork over up to $10,000, and then, equipped with paintball guns, they begin hunting naked women. And from the blurred out photos I've seen, if the men happen to hit their target, ritual seems to dictate that they must then drag their "prey" away caveman style. (I can't help but think that someone over at the Fox network is right now weighing the options for a new reality show based on this phenomenon). Kind of like Field and Stream meets Hustler.

For being both degraded beyond what I had previously imagined possible and putting themselves voluntarily at risk of being hit by a paintball traveling 200 miles per hour (they are naked, remember), the women are compensated on a performance-based scale: $2,500 if they remain bodily unscathed, $1,000 if they get hit.

Across the web, throughout both media and individual blog pages commenting on the new "sport" (read, interactive pornography), the general consensus seems to be that Hunting For Bambi is, of course, both "stupid" and "gross".

TRENDING: Is this what you voted for, America?

What is bothersome, however, is that the overall reaction, even in the most conservative corners of cyberspace, is far less vehement than the reaction the editors here at Business Reform received last week in response to Noah Knox's article on Wal-Mart's decision to extend their anti-discrimination policy to cover homosexuals and the discussion across the web concerning the Supreme Court's decision to overturn anti-sodomy laws in Texas.

While I am certainly not negating the potential dangers of the retail giant's decision and the threat it seems to pose to the moral fabric of our country, I am a bit disturbed at the variation in response. On one hand, a business decides to further define its respect and value for its employees (I agree with Noah that discrimination, in the sense used here, is unbiblical), and my inbox is flooded with cries for a nationwide boycott and not-so-clever maledictions concerning the fiery and eternal fate of the homosexual community at-large. On the other hand, a new business begins offering men the chance to hunt naked women like animals (in the most violently literal sense of the word), the story makes national headlines, and the general consensus seems to be that it is, at worst, disturbing.

Please do not misunderstand me: I am in no way advocating either Wal-Mart's or the Supreme Court's respective decisions. Instead, I am simply pointing out a very bothersome bias that seems to exist in the conservative psyche of this country. Peaceful homosexuality, in the mind of the right, is far more disturbing than violent heterosexuality. The values upon which this country was founded seem to be threatened more by the very idea of a potential gay agenda, it appears, than by violently pornographic photographic evidence of female exploitation.

The reasons for this strange ordering of evils are complicated, no doubt, but the primary explanation seems to lie in the question of the "ick factor". In this country we continue to have a literally visceral problem with homosexuality ? one that far outweighs our gut response to what are surely greater evils ? and because of that, our focus, I think, is tragically off-center. I guarantee that if the conservative constituency of this country were made to choose between two boycotts ? one of Wal-Mart and its supposed new embracing of "the gay agenda", and another of television at large for its constant barrage of violently pornographic images (you can't even watch a baseball game these days without seeing women rip off each other's clothes) ? the former would win out by a landslide. Why? Because even implied homosexuality is "grosser" than explicit heterosexuality. The result of this, then, is mass hysteria fueled more by juvenile aversion than by sound biblical (not to mention rational) thinking.

While I don't want to point out the pieces of sky at our feet, I will say this: our watered-down and distorted view of the values that have defined our country and our faith have gotten us into our country's present mess, and I have a feeling that if we don't start examining at what, exactly, we are aiming our ire, things are only going to get worse.

Hunting For Bambi: and we wonder why radical religious groups want to eradicate us.

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