Michelle Shocked’s rambling, quasi-coherent appearance on Piers Morgan Tonight this Monday wasn’t nearly as, well, shocking as Alex Jones‘s — but it did inspire nearly as many furrowed brows.
The born-again alt-folk singer stopped by the show in order to apologize for and clarify anti-gay remarks she made at a concert March 17. (A sample: “When they stop Prop 8 and force priests at gunpoint to marry gays, it will be the downfall of civilization, and Jesus will come back… You can go on Twitter and say, ‘Michelle Shocked says God hates f—s.’”) While Shocked began by unequivocally admitting that she “made a mistake,” her explanation soon went off the rails.
“If I had the chance to go back and do it again, I don’t think I would have taken the audience up on their choice. I had presented an entire performance, and I had framed it as truth, and then I came back out for an encore, and they requested reality,” Shocked said, as though she were explaining that 2 plus 2 is 4. “And what has consequently taken place ever since then is my manifestation of how little I think of reality. I know that it’s a stock in trade for a lot of the media to just present things like that’s how it really is, but I don’t think the audience was ready for the consequences of that. And I surely have not been happy with it.”
