PrintMay 20, 2007
Selective sensitivity
Ted Byfield, columnist for the Calgary Sun (probably my favorite newspaper in North America), points to a Canadian analogue for the selective sensitivity toward religions demonstrated in Lewiston, Maine. It seems that the taxpayer-owned and supported Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has produced a pilot program for series to be called The Altar Boy Gang. He writes:
In the show, the teen-aged males do what is presumed to be typical altar-boy things -- they do drugs, they use the communion wafers as snack food, and they lace some of them with LSD -- that kind of stuff.All of this goes on under the nose of the hapless Father Sand, standing in as a representative of the Catholic hierarchy.
There is a word which describes such behavior: blasphemy. All the more startling when contrasted with this awkward fact about the CBC, cited by Byfield
Just how, they will ask, does the CBC reconcile its jovially cavalier attitude towards the sacred rituals of the Catholic church with the fact they appointed a special Muslim consultant last year to make sure Muslim sacred things were not offended in any way in the series Little Mosque on the Prairie.
As a thought experiment, just imagine a series about Muslim youths at a mosque who ate ham sandwiches within its sacred confines and joked about the Prophet's marriage to a pre-pubescent girl? How likely would that be to air on the CBC or any other media outlet controlled by any government?
And how many Canadian embassies would burn to the ground after the broadcast became known throughout the Muslim world.
One of the tests of bigotry is treating similar acts differently when carried out or applied to different groups. Clearly the CBC is demonstrating bigotry. For my own part, I am rather indifferent to what the media portrays. There is plenty of anti-Catholic bigotry available in the Western media and I am not persuaded that it is desirable to censor it. But I do want government agencies applying the same standards to different groups. If the CBC shows the pilot program, it should be prepared to apply the same standard to Little Mosque. If not, it should can the pilot. Or admit that it hates Catholicism and loves Isalm, and be done with the pretense of being other than a vicious propaganda organ.
Hat tip: Jerome Schmitt
