In Israel, Adam Lambert would have won

In Israel, Adam Lambert would have won

By Bradley Burston

If it had been up to Israelis, "American Idol" runner-up Adam Lambert would have won.

Not because he's Jewish. Because he can sing.

Israelis keep asking me why Adam Lambert, whose gargantuan talent clearly places him in the category of Touched By God, didn't win. Here is one reason:

Because many, many Americans don't want to think that God works that way.

I should state at the outset that is not a column about music. This is, at heart, about deviance, and how societies respond to the deviants in their midst - whether with fascistic denial ("In Iran, we don't have homosexuals"), or with an unease that spurs them to seek desperate refuge in the bland.

Seldom has a singing contest been so clear-cut a case of no contest. In a final duet alongside eventual winner Kris Allen, Adam Lambert sang him off the stage. And no one knew that better than Kris Allen.

So what was it about Lambert that moved tens of millions of Americans to make sure that he would not win?

Some, at least, decided to take a stand. It was time to cast a vote against deviant behavior. Against men who keep their eyeliner thick and their sexual preference determinedly indeterminate. Against a polite, generous, fearsomely gifted deviant.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1087783.html