Verizon pulls sponsorship from dirty dancing singer

US mobile operator Verizon has had a fit of moral outrage and cut sponsorship of a tour featuring R'n'B artist Akon after he dry humped a 15-year-old girl - the daughter of a preacher - on stage. Verizon had signed on to pony up for the North American lollop of bequiffed pop strumpet Gwen Stefani's world tour, where Akon was …

[Anonymous Coward]

No Moral Highground

First: What did Jerry Lee Lewis, Prince and Sheena Easton do to deserve these kind of vitriolic comments? I'd say that Chris has some real issues to work out. This seems like a pretty rancid and unprovoked attack on performers completely unrelated to the story at hand.

He doesn't like Sheena's "mogrel-accented" voice so much he uses an article about an entertainer behaving inappropriately on stage to demean her talent? Has he been waiting for an opportunity to attack this woman, but finally gave up and decided this unrelated incident would just have to suffice?

I realize that this article is written in a way to make the reader think he's trying to be funny, but if that were so wouldn't he actually be funny?

Second: If there's any company in the world without a moral foot to stand on it's Verizon. I really don't think we need a company with the ethics of Verizon as our moral compass.

As far as the mobile operators and their lack of "moral conscience", maybe they just don't see it as their position to make these kinds of decisions for their customers or maybe they think this borders a little too close to censorship.

I guess Chris feels that we can always use more of enough the knee-jerk reactions and political opportunism we saw with the Don Imus gaff.

People will probably be so morally outraged by this that the demand to watch it will come close to bringing down a couple of U-Tube's servers.

[Ian Damage]

What did Jerry Lee Lewis do?

He bonked underage kiddies thats what he did.

Read some history before defending the bloody perv.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too late - they pulled the plug on the video... (n.T.)

n.T.

[Anonymous Coward]

you miss the point

What does Mr. Humpty-dance and the Preacher's daughter (good movie title?) have to do with Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his underage cousin and why attack Jerry for something unrelated to him because of something he did a half a century ago. Plus, it was kiddy, not "kiddies", which implies that he was a multiple offender, and he was never publicly lewd, which is what this article is about, not celebrity's private lives. He didn't urinate on anyone either, but I noticed that incident blatantly missing from the article.

What underage child did Sheena E. have sex with or dry hump in public? Please, Mr. HistoryBuff, give the background on this one. Everyone knows about Jerry, but I am in the dark about Sheena's molestation history.

What horrible things did any of those bashed in this article do that relates directly to this article? That was the point of my post. I didn't feel it necessary to point out something that everyone, and I mean everyone, already knew.

[Steve Sutton]

This video is no longer available...

...says YouTube