Mayors in Underwear and Muslim Culture from Planck's Constant

Oregon Mayor Carmen Kontur Gronquist lingerie photos posing on fire truck

Photo Credit: KATU

Earlier this year TV station KATU reported a story about Oregon Mayor Carmen Kontur Gronquist who had lingerie photos of herself posing on the town's fire truck on her MySpace website before she was mayor.

KATU, 7 Jan 2008, Mayor's racy photos become the talk of the town
In an interview with the (Pendleton) East Oregonian, the mayor said she did nothing wrong and those who are offended need to get over it.

"That's my personal life," she said. "It has nothing to do with my mayor's position."

Kontur-Gronquist, who is also the fire department's executive secretary, said the photos were taken before she was elected mayor three years ago, and she saw no reason to remove them from the Internet after taking office.

"I'm not going to change who I am," she said. "There's a lot of officials that have a personal life, and you have people in this community who have nothing better to do than scrape up stuff like this."

The town has almost 500 residents enough of whom were so concerned with her Myspace page than her views on taxes, local infrastructure, housing, and development that they got her fired. It seems we have our own brand of Taliban running around in this country. While we make fun of Muslims who are mired in the 7th century A.D. we should not ignore the fact that many of our own citizens are not far from them either.

We live in a time when every single thing that we do can be taped, photographed, digitized, filed away somewhere, or blogged about that pretty soon the only people without some social blemish who will be able to hold office will be inhabitants of nunneries and monasteries. Let's get some perspective here.

I bring up this matter because I noticed a spike in traffic to an old post of mine on art teacher Tamara Hoover (I'm in the top 6 on google search) who was fired because nude photos of her showed up on Flickr (since removed) which interest was re-kindled by a recent PC WORLD article entitled 12 Photos That Should Never Have Been Posted Online.

Here for you American prudes is what you most resemble:

Times Online UK, Muslim group targets poster nudity
A website giving advice on how to vandalise billboards and listing potential targets has been set up by a group calling themselves Muslims Against Advertising (MAAD).

The campaign has gathered momentum since the Advertising Standards Authority banned an underwear advert from being sited near mosques.

Advertisements for perfume, hair dye, bras and television programmes are among those that have been attacked. Photographs of semi-dressed women are the most frequently targeted, with the offending body parts painted over or ripped off.

A poster advertising the Channel 4 programme Desperate Housewives is the most recent target; the images of two scantily-clad actresses have been torn from an East London billboard but three fully-dressed characters were left intact. Adverts bearing Dove’s “Real Women” adverts — six ordinary women pictured in their underwear — were painted over at several locations last year.