“Another kid? Another kid?” said comedian Chris Rock after Michael Jackson was accused a second time of child molestation. “That’s how much we love Michael. We let the first kid slide….I’m done with Michael.” But America wasn’t.

Rock should update his bit: it is clear, after almost half a month of feverish adulation, that America was prepared to let Jackson’s behavior “slide” no matter how many children he corrupted. He could have been accused of molesting twenty children and it still wouldn’t have mattered.

Earlier in the week Colin Powell had pronounced, with his typical pomposity and cravenly ginger euphemism, that America should “celebrate his art” and not his “controversy.” Coming out of glorious retirement to teach the nation how to grieve, Powell counseled Americans to focus on Jackson’s talent and not the “challenges in his life.”

This is how grown-ups talk circa 2009: molesting children is a “controversy,” “questionable behavior,” and a “challenge.”

But the organizers of Jackson’s ghoulish memorial ignored Powell’s advice: celebrating the “controversy” and not just the art ended up generating some of the loudest applause. Peering down at Jackson’s lab-generated children, Al Sharpton declared, “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with.” Congressperson Sheila Jackson Lee chipped in that she would try and honor this innocent-until-proven-guilty “humanitarian” on the House floor.

But the Dems couldn’t muster the courage of their convictions. Lee’s resolution is “not necessary,” sniffed a slightly scared Nancy Pelosi at a Thursday press conference.

Perhaps Lee should take her case directly to Obama and urge him to re-name June, the month of Jackson’s death and heretofore “LGBT month,” Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Michael Jackson month.

Why not? Sharpton, after all, is right: There is nothing odd about modern America honoring an (ostensibly) bisexual corrupter of youth. The oddballs today, as Obama asserted at a White House “LGBT” reception last week, are members of the benighted bourgeois who harbor  “worn” reservations about homosexuality, bisexuality, and sex-change operations. Pity them, Obama, in a moment of expansiveness, in effect told the cheering crowd. They are “good” but deluded folk.

Sharpton is correct: A nation which turns tots over to gay couples at adoption agencies, plunges elementary-school children into LGBT propaganda, cheers gay pride parades in major cities with the National Man Boy Love Association in tow, and parks kids in front of MTV to watch endless hours of gyrating perversity, should find nothing strange about Michael Jackson.

While the elite may get worked up about Sarah Palin’s “white trash concupiscence,” it has never found pederasty all that objectionable. After all, as the New Yorker bishop, Milwaukee Archbishop Emeritus Rembert Weakland once held, the kids “forget” and grow out of the molestation anyways. For all of the elite’s opportunistic outrage about molestation in the Catholic Church in America, many members of it, when the glare of the cameras faded and the story grew boring, couldn’t quite bring themselves to call for the offenders to be ejected from the priesthood, because of their basic ideological sympathy for homosexual pederasty (into which most of the cases fall).

Listening to the tributes, Michael Jackson, one would think, is not just the “greatest entertainer of all time,” as an early producer of his put it, but the man of this early century and maybe the last one. And perhaps he is — this age’s King Tut of perverse pop culture buried in his golden coffin and laborious mummy wrap covering his self-mutilation whose glorious descent into the grave marks the final triumph of the abnormal.