If Imus Had Called Mother Teresa a “Ho” He’d Still Have a Job
In case you were planning a career as a nasty, mean-spirited shock-jock, who makes his living using his media pulpit to slam people who mostly can’t (or won’t) fight back, here’s a handy tip: Stick to attacking our culture’s designated pinatas. Working-class whites, Southerners, all white Protestants (but especially Evangelicals), stay-at-home moms, and Mormons are all safe targets. In most circles, Arabs and the French are fair game, too.
Feel especially free to trash Catholics, of course. The admirable Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights has highlighted the extent of the double standard applied to the defamation of Christians and of other groups in the U.S. League president Bill Donohue commented on the way Catholic bashers are treated as compared to Don Imus:
“Two years ago, Penn Jillette (of the comedy team Penn and Teller) went on Showtime calling Mother Teresa ‘Mother F—king Teresa’ and called the nuns who worked with her ‘f—king c—ts.’ Showtime is owned by Viacom and that is why I wrote to its chief, Sumner Redstone, to register a complaint. He wrote back extolling the merits of ‘artistic freedom’ and ‘tolerance.’ Last year, on Viacom-owned CBS radio, Jillette said Mother Teresa ‘had this weird kink that I think was sexual,’ compared the saintly nun to Charles Manson and said she ‘got her [sexual] kicks watching people suffer and die.’ Again, nothing was done about this.
“In 2005, Bill Maher went on HBO at the time of the death of Pope John Paul II and said, ‘For those who could not make the funeral, the Vatican has asked that in lieu of flowers, just stop touching your d—k.’ He also said that the whole story of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and the Resurrection was ‘grafted from paganism’; he ended by mocking the death of the pope and the upcoming conclave. The letter I received from HBO said that ‘it’s a free country, and people are free to say silly things—even on HBO.’
“Right before Easter, the Catholic League protested the chocolate Jesus with his genitals exposed that was to be shown in the art gallery of the Roger Smith Hotel in midtown Manhattan (located on street level, the public was invited to eat him). Air America radio co-host Cenk Uygur, writing on ‘The Huffington Post,’ said, ‘So is the argument that Jesus didn’t have a d—k? Or were people offended because it was too big? Too Small? Too immaculate? Not immaculate enough?’ Regarding Imus’s remark, Uygur called it ‘derogatory and insulting.’
“Similarly, Joan Walsh on Salon.com said the chocolate Jesus was not ‘a big deal,’ and advised people not to go see it if they didn’t like it. She has now called on Imus to be fired. Even New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg said ‘don’t pay any attention’ to the chocolate Jesus, but he now finds it necessary to brand Imus’ comments ‘repugnant.’
“In other words, Catholic bashing is humorous and an exercise in liberty. Racism is awful. Bigotry, then, is neither good nor bad—it just depends who the target is.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Comments
I’m on holiday at the moment and I have made a promise to myself to avoid all all internet communications until the first of May. However, this is just too provocative for me to resist, and so I must say:
What would Cenk Uighur (or whatever the hell his impossible Turkic name is) or Joan Walsh say, if the “Chocolate Jesus” had been titled, “Chocolate Jew” or “Chocolate African?” And mind you, Jesus Christ was a Jew, and all Catholics believe Christ was a perfect African too (because he was a perfect Human.)
I’m just asking…
And, who the HELL is Cenk Uighur? All I know is that the Chinese Communist Party persecute the Uighurs of Western China, who are Muslims today, but they were among the mainstream of ancestors of most Eastern European Jews around 1,600 years ago. At any rate, the Uighurs have always fared far better in Christian countries than in atheist ones.
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PS, errata,
Sorry, I meant 1,400 years ago, not 1,600. 1,100 to 1,400 years ago, during China’s Tang dynasty, the ancestors of today’s Muslim Uighurs of Western China included a considerable number of the ancestors of most Eastern European Jews of today. Most Eastern European Jews descend from the Turkic (and other obscure Asiatic) nomads of Western China and Central Asia, who converted to Judaism during the Dark Ages.
This OUGHT to be a source of PRIDE for Eastern European Jews, to know that for a while, for around 300 years, while they were nomadic barbarians, at least for a while they belonged to a great civilisation, the civilisation of China. China’s National Museum in Beijing has some relics of the nomadic barbarian converts to Judaism, of Western China and Central Asia, who later became the Jews of Russia and Poland, and then some of them intermarried with European Jews, the true descendants of Israel.
All Eastern European Jews OUGHT to be proud of this, of their heritage as being part of the great civilisation of China - a far more noble heritage than their principal bloodlines of barbarian nomads of the Central Asian Steppes.
At any rate, I meant 1,600 years ago, during China’s Tang Dynasty.
(Gloss, from the Gospel: Jesus said: “God can turn these STONES into sons of Abraham!”.......)
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This essay on the selective use of artistic and
intellectual freedom is superb.The besmirching of
Christian holy figures is related to the PC
intimidation practiced during the Imus affair. It is
an infantile imitation of what the Communists did with
less obscenity when they displaced and
downgraded Christian symbols.
The current democratic Left is a morally degenerate
version of Communism albeit one allied to consumerism,
media manipulation, and an obsessive guilt about
white racism.
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How about a nude, anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Martin Luther King? I just bet that the media would support such “freedom of expression\”.
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You have the right to be offended by Mr. Jillette’s comments on Mother Teressa, but they were generally accurate. She presided over painful and often unnecessary death with the sole intention of bullying people into Catholicism in their dying hours.
She had no real caritas, only the desire to impose herself on people in their most vulnerable and powerless hour. If she had genuinely cared for the dying she would have spent more time teaching her nuns to properly move a dying tuberculosis patient without causing pain worthy of Guantamo Bay interrogations. There were plenty of nurses (many Catholic nuns) who would have taught them at no charge. This
“saint” didn’t have time to learn being more busy smozing with the powerful for her greater glory.
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