Just a quick note to follow-up on Old Man Mattingly's post about different standards for Christians, Jews and Muslims. Catholic church leaders in New Zealand are calling for a boycott of television stations that plan to screen an "ugly and tasteless" episode of South Park, according to the BBC. I have seen many episodes of South Park and I can't think of one that wasn't ugly or tasteless. Sometimes they're even funny.
Anyway, the problem for the church leaders is that the episode depicts the Virgin Mary in a sacrilegious way. The stations, which recently apologized to Muslims for airing the cartoons, have a different response to the Christian protests:
TV station C4 is to air the cartoon earlier than planned in response to the levels of publicity it has generated.
The episode was originally scheduled for a screening in May, but will now be shown on 22 February. . . .
Rick Friesen, head of TV Works, which runs C4, said that if Catholics felt they would be upset by South Park, then they should not watch it.
Quick style note: It really bothers and confuses me how so many reporters use Catholic when they mean Roman Catholic. Catholic means universal and Roman Catholic refers to that church based out of, well, Rome. There is a difference. Many people who are not Roman Catholic consider themselves catholic -- and even Catholic sometimes.
But it looks like the New Zealand station has found a consistent strategy for dealing with potentially offensive material -- apologize to Muslims and tell Roman Catholics to buzz off.
Stories like this also makes me wonder why American media are not fighting on behalf of press freedom in this ongoing cartoon controversy. We can certainly imagine that if it becomes culturally or legally impossible to make any criticism of Islam in political cartoons, religious adherents of all types will expect equal or similar treatment.
Do reporters and editors really want a world where we can't criticize any religion in cartoons? Maybe the heroes in Team America should pay a visit to a few of our newsrooms and straighten some folks out.