Nothing makes me angrier than religious bigotry being shoved down my throat. Oh, wait, yeah when religion is also involved.

Recently Ron Vietti, senior pastor of Valley Bible Fellowship, depicted the “evils” of MySpace.com.? According to an article in the Bakersfield Californian, Vietti plans to host a group of people to go around bars and popular hangout places to urge people to “delete MySpace from their lives.”

Vietti told his congregation that MySpace is evil because it exposes people to bisexuality and because MySpace is used by child predators to set up “sex dates” with minors. Vietti also mentioned that he found pornography and explicit pictures of young girls.

I believe that Vietti is totally missing the point of MySpace.com. As the Web site says, MySpace is a “place for friends,” and the true evil does not lie within the fancy HTML or cascading style sheets but within the user.

Yes, there are some freaks on MySpace who use it to get to minors or invite girls over for latenight rendezvous (I have been solicited many times), but that’s not MySpace’s fault and MySpace shouldn’t be blamed or labeled as “evil”. There are sexual predators everywhere, not just on the Internet, so should the whole world be condemned as evil? I think not.

Also, pornography didn’t come more easily available with the creation of the Internet, it was always around and available even before Playboy. Pornography existed within people’s minds. It wasn’t called pornography but the idea was the same.

Vietti also spoke of his “battles” against pornography when he was 13 years old. If you ask me, he’s just playing the red scare trying to find the root of all evil when the root of all evil is within mankind, and he’s blaming MySpace. Besides trying to find a moral equivalence between a 13-year-old boy bursting with hormones and an Internet site is well, impossible, because they’re just isn’t one.

Users can use MySpace as “a place for friends” or as a place to pick up minors. But as humans, even minors are responsible for their own actions, and if young girls feel mature enough to pose explicitly then they should also feel mature enough to handle the situation when an older person approaches them with more serious intentions.

Also, the argument that MySpace exposes people to bisexuality is bogus. If people are exposed to bisexuality then maybe they’ll become bisexual? Is that his fear? That’s like saying that I’ve become heterosexual because I’ve been exposed to it, and that is so not the case.

I’ve used MySpace for almost a year and have found many of my old friends who I keep in contact with, thanks to MySpace. I’ve also made a few good new friends. However, I’ve yet to find pornography, but then again if I felt like looking at porn, I’ll just go rent one.

If I feel like “hitting” on someone younger than me I’ll drive by a high school or maybe a junior high. Without MySpace, children are still vulnerable to sexual predators. No I’m not really going to hit on minors, but I hope you get my point.

MySpace is what it says it is: a place for friends. Act accordingly.