Reactions to this year’s Super Bowl’s halftime show were, as usual, mixed. However, some have shown to be more upset with the joint performance from Shakira and Jennifer Lopez than others. Such is the case with Dave Daubenmire, a right-wing activist who’s threatening to sue the NFL over the broadcast because he believes it put his religious standing in peril.
“I think we ought to sue,” he said on his podcast, Pass the Salt, via Right Wing Watch. “Would that halftime show, would that have been rated PG? Were there any warnings that your 12-year-old son — whose hormones are just starting to operate — was there any warning that what he was going to see might cause him to get sexually excited?”
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While it may be a case of Daubenmire simply venting his frustrations, he did sketch out his legal strategy, of sorts.
“I think we ought to go sit down in a courtroom and present this as evidence of how whoever [is behind the halftime show] is keeping me from getting into the kingdom of Heaven,” he continued. “Could I go into a courtroom and say, ‘Viewing what you put on that screen put me in danger of hellfire?’ Could the court say, ‘That doesn’t apply here because the right to [make] porn overrides your right to [not] watch it?’ Yeah, well, you didn’t tell me I was gonna watch it! You just brought it into my living room. You didn’t tell me there were gonna be crotch shots! That’s discriminatory against the value I have in my house. You can’t just do that.”
As far as the amount he’d be seeking, Dabenmire put it in the neighborhood of “about $867 trillion.”
Along with Dabenmire, Fast & Furious star Lucas Black called the performance a “display of sexual exploitation” on Twitter, which caused the expected amount of blowback. Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider also wasn’t a fan, although he stressed his criticism came from his general distaste of pop music — and later advocated for AC/DC to play the slot in 2021.
Lopez, meanwhile, called it “one of the best” halftime shows of all time, saying that she and Shakira did it to “represent women and single moms and working moms and say, ‘This is what you can do.’”
Her pride in the performance was also evident on stage when she gave Shakira a congratulatory pat on the butt near the end.
