Canada
Ted Byfield
Canadians don’t dare offend Muslims, said Ted Byfield in the Calgary Sun. Yet taxpayer money is lavished on programming that mocks Christianity. Last year, when the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. made the TV series Little Mosque on the Prairie, it hired a “special Muslim consultant” to make sure that sacred Muslim practices were not belittled. This year, though, the CBC used public funds to create a pilot for a TV show that depicts Catholic kids as heathens and delinquents. The Altar Boy Gang is a zany comedy about teens doing “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.” Not surprisingly, the Catholic Civil Rights League complained to the CBC that the show was “blasphemous.” What was surprising was the CBC’s dismissive response. It said “compelling programming” often involved “images that someone could find disturbing.” In Canada, apparently, that’s true only as long as that someone is not a Muslim.
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