Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Mass media giant Viacom is looking to the Church to rescue its flagging sales by launching a new outdoor ad campaign in New York City that features the heads of characters from the Comedy Central show on images of Sacred Heart votive candles.
Catholic League President Bill Donohue is calling for action against Viacom for posting the offensive ads on phone booths throughout the city.
“I know Viacom’s first quarter ad sales are down 5 percent, and that they just laid off 264 employees in New York City, but nothing justifies ramping up their audience by exploiting Catholic iconography,” he writes.
This isn’t the first time Viacom has tried to make a buck off of blatant bigotry. In 2001, they produced one of the most anti-Catholic plays ever written – Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. The play was riddled with so many malicious attacks on Catholic beliefs that even theater critics ripped the play for its bigotry. When questioned about it, the show’s director, Marshall Brickman, revealed how completely uninformed he is about Catholicism by citing a litany of anti-Catholic myths as an explanation for his intolerance. “Any institution that backed the Inquisition, the Crusades and the Roman position on the Holocaust deserves to be the butt of a couple of jokes,” he said at the time.
But this isn’t the worst of it. Viacom has taken intolerance to even lower and much raunchier levels. In 2012, Comedy Central flashed a picture of a naked woman with her legs spread and a nativity scene ornament in between—what Jon Stewart called “the vagina manger”. On May 8 of that year, the Catholic League mailed a color photo of the image to Viacom’s directors and asked them to direct Stewart to apologize. They refused, of course. But around the same time, when comedian Don Rickles made a racist joke about Obama on one of their networks, they displayed just how hypocritical they are by hurriedly nixing the scene.
For all of the above reasons, Donohue is extending them a real challenge. “If they think we are overreacting, and that this is just fun and games, then they ought to demonstrate their much-vaunted fidelity to inclusion by posting Islamic iconography on street corners around the city.”
Fat chance!
Put a stop of this kind of the unwarranted abuse of our God and our faith by contacting Viacom and demanding that they discontinue this offensive ad campaign.
Contact Carl Folta, Executive VP, Viacom Communications at Carl.Folta@viacom.com
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