Ice cream ad banned as "offensive" to Catholics

[Kadie]

Ice cream ad banned as "offensive" to Catholics

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

(09-15) 08:39 PDT LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

Britain's advertising watchdog has banned an Italian ice cream ad featuring a pregnant nun, saying it causes offense to Catholics.

The magazine ad for ice cream maker Antonio Federici showed the nun eating a tub of ice cream, with text that read: "Immaculately conceived ... Ice cream is our religion."

The Advertising Standards Authority said Wednesday it has received 10 complaints from magazine readers who said the ad was offensive to Christians. The agency said imagery used to illustrate immaculate conception was likely to be seen as mocking the beliefs of Roman Catholics.

The Italian company said the idea of conception represented the development of their ice cream and the ad aimed to gently satirize religion.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/09/15/international/i083915D84.DTL&tsp=1

[boston bean]

1. Don't fuck with the Virgin Mary!

[Javaman]

66. I posted a little skit here on DU a few years back

lampooning the "virgin" birth, but it was deleted.

good thing I save my work. It was funny, if I do say so myself. LOL

freedom of speech and all that...LOL

[hlthe2b]

2. Monty Python could have gotten by with it...

They should have had a male dressed as the nun...;)

[piratefish08]

3. hey Catholic Church, know what offends me?

it starts with 'ped' and ends with 'ophilia'.............

[Hepburn]

11. Is this word in the middle?

PRIEST

That offends the shit out me a hell of a lot more than a pregnant nun.

JMHO

[Ian David]

4. She's a total NILF. n/t

[sinkingfeeling]

5. Love Italian gelato!

[Ian David]

6. See also: The Streisand effect

Streisand effect
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Streisand effect is a primarily online phenomenon in which an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information has the unintended consequence of causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, following a 2003 incident in which her attempts to suppress photographs of her residence inadvertently generated further publicity.

As early as 1993, John Gilmore observed that "the Net treats censorship as damage and routes around it."<1> Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet or distributed on file-sharing networks.<2><3>

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

[NoNothing]

7. Halfway around the world, Catholic rioting over the ad resulted in dozens killed and injured

Headline you won't see, curiously enough.

[jobycom]

22. Why would you expect to see that headline?

:shrug:

[GoneOffShore]

33. Depends if William Donohue hears about it.

There would be much fainting and clutching of pearls.

[mjane]

24. You wouldn't.

That's the point.

Catholics don't riot and murder over offense to their religion.

There is one religion wherein rioting and murder routinely happens when public displays of offense are made, whether through literature, film, art, or other public displays.

It's like that old school thing - compare and contrast.

[mitchum]

37. Don't you mean "Catholics don't riot and murder over offense to their religion"...any longer?

History's a bitch

[mjane]

38. well yes.

I talking about the world we live in, not what happened in the past.

Fwiw, there were numerous examples in the past of pagan sacrifices. I am not aware that this is currently a practice in the civilized world, and thus not a concern. In the past, blimp transport was extremely dangerous due to the use of hydrogen. This is no longer the case and if I was talking about blimp travel, I wouldn't feel the need to qualify it with "in the current world". It's a given assumption in any discussion of the world.

I didn't realize I needed to qualify my statement with "in the current world we live in, not the past"

If I was discussing ANY topic, would you qualify it with "any longer" in such a response?

No. Because the default assumption when we talk about the world is that we are talking about the world we live in, not the past.

[Viking12]

40. Ireland?

[mjane]

41. I'm not aware that Irish catholics

are engaging in violence over mere criticisms or parody of religion.

Nor is that the case with the Protestants.

Try again.

When Monty Python made fun of Catholics in Meaning of Life was there rioting and killing specifically because of that mockery?

um, no.

[wickerwoman]

62. No, just soccer games.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Firm

[mitchum]

43. See 40 and 39...I was counting on those because I anticipated your weasely response

[Ikonoklast]

39. Never been to Belfast, I see.

[mjane]

42. Actually, I have

Regardless, they are not rioting and murdering over verbal parody and/or print publications mocking or criticizing their religion.

That's a gross distortion of what the "troubles" are over.

Monty Python has mocked Catholics repeatedly. I am not aware that anybody was murdered over that.

There is an armed conflict between two sides over independence, what is perceived as foreign rule, sovereignty etc.

It is not a war over people making Catholic jokes or Protestant jokes.

And you darn well know it.

[mitchum]

44. Oh...now you are qualifying "offense" How....jesuitical..of you

[mjane]

47. I'm not qualifying anything

I am explaining to you the obvious difference, that you of course recognize, but enjoy playing games.

The struggles in Northern Ireland are not happening because some Brits made fun of Catholics.

And you know it.

It is amazing the absurd dances people like you will play lest they have to admit that there is only one major religion that has members who routinely riot and murder over jokes, insults, cartoons, political theatre (Quran burning and even threatened Quran burning) and films depicting their religion in a bad way.

Nobody put out a death contract on Scorcese. He didn't go into hiding.

We have already had murders over the mere THREAT of a Quran burning.

NOBODY got murdered when Serrano dunked a Crucifix in urine in a museum display.

Try making a public display of a Quran dunked in urine and see what happens.

I realize that you are playing the part of a creationist here. No facts will sway your prejudice. But, it's still worthwhile to spend some time exposing your evasions.

[mitchum]

48. I don't defend any of those fucking abrahamic slave religions...

(judaism, christianity,islam)
they are all a blight arising from fairy tales for raggedy-assed herdsmen

[mjane]

49. Again with the evasions

This isn't about the religions and whether they are fairy tales or not.

This is about how adherents/believers ACT and the significant contrast.

Assume arguendo they are all fairy tales. Great.

Hindus, Buddhists, Christians (of all stripes), Jews, etc. accept people who mock their religion ... by accept I mean they do not murder and riot over mockery, satire, etc. of their religion.

I'm not espousing that this says anything about Islam - the belief system. I am saying that the FOLLOWERS thereof are a different story.

Anybody in a liberal democracy should be free to scorn, satirize, etc. any religion. The reality is that this is not the case.

That's because (some) followers of Islam AS CONTRASTED with followers of Judaism, Christianity, etc. will riot and murder when you do so.

That's a significant difference.

And none of your evasions address that.

[jobycom]

50. Complete bigoted horseshit.

The Catholic Church has enough power to gut people legally when they are offended. They get major films edited to make them look better, or they squash those films through a mountain of protests. They buy all rights to books, movies, scripts, history texts, and you name it when a book makes them look bad or offends them. Popular entertainers have had their careers ended at the height of their fame for insulting and offending the Pope or the Catholic Church. Go even further and look at the numbers of lives they ruined and allowed to be ruined to protect their image over child molestations. Even the current pope covered up brutal, horrific crimes and fought to keep the criminals in a position to continue ruining the lives of young boys to prevent any insult or scandal from touching the Church. Now he's so very, very sorry for it, of course. And if you want violent bloodshed, go back a couple of centuries when Catholics and Protestants were murdering each other in the streets of Europe in the thousands, to the point were contemporaries said you couldn't walk the streets of Paris without literally walking over the bodies of the people murdered the night before. No, the Catholic Church isn't all bad, and they've done tremendous good in the world (as has Islam), but they aren't clean.

Christians in the West have enough power to handle their offenses without large protests, unlike Muslims living in nations that routinely kill them for political boost, allow insane protests over the location of community centers or mosques, and generally treat them as third or fourth class citizens. When Catholics or other brands of Christianity are offended in the West, they use their political clout to handle it. They even get school boards to force textbooks to rewrite history so they won't be offended.

If Muslims had that type of power, if they had a hope in Hell of their complaints being hard instead of being treated with scorn, they wouldn't have such violent protests, either. Somehow, being the butt of discriminatory laws, being the targets of hate crimes, seeing their nations of origin invaded and millions of innocent people slaughtered to boost a couple of political reputations, and having absolutely no chance of their protests being heard raises their sensitivity a little bit. Maybe it makes them shout a little louder to be heard. Those shouts scare cops who are brainwashed into fearing them, and they open fire quickly, and protests turn to riots.

And every culture has its sacred icon. Try claiming the Holocaust didn't happen in the West. How do you think Catholics would react if Time Magazine ran a cartoon of the Pope having graphic, anatomically visible sex with Mother Teresa while forcing orphan children to join in? You think anyone would protest? I guarantee you they would, and you know it. If no one listened to their protests, they would even get violent. Christians have their sacred cows, too. But we in the West decide what free speech issues we are going to protect and which we are going to say are just too offensive to us. We don't give Muslims living around us that same power, so of course they protest.

I'm sick of this ignorant bigotry. Sick to goddamned death of it. I have to listen to it on the television. I have to listen to the ignorant conservative fucks around me on the one hand talk about how violent Muslims are, while on the other hand praising the bloody wars against Muslim nations that never harmed us, or even seriously discussing nuking Baghdad or Mecca. I've heard Ann Coulter say we should kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. I have to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger films blowing Muslims up left and right because THEY are supposed to be the violent ones.

This filth has no place on DU. I come here to get away from it.

[Rage for Order]

53. LOL...that's quite the twisting in knots

"The Catholic Church has enough power to gut people legally when they are offended."

Muslims can't "gut" people legally, so it's okay for them to murder people.

"If Muslims had that type of power, if they had a hope in Hell of their complaints being hard (sic) instead of being treated with scorn, they wouldn't have such violent protests, either."

The violent protests are actually taking place in majority Muslim countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan. Are you saying that Muslims don't have power in those countries and have no hope of having their complaints being heard?

"How do you think Catholics would react if Time Magazine ran a cartoon of the Pope having graphic, anatomically visible sex with Mother Teresa while forcing orphan children to join in? You think anyone would protest? I guarantee you they would, and you know it."

Protesting and rioting/murdering are rather far apart in the behavioral spectrum, don't you think?

"I have to watch Arnold Schwarzenegger films blowing Muslims up left and right because THEY are supposed to be the violent ones."

You actually don't have to watch those films. The federal governmental Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice will not arrest you if you refuse to watch a movie.

[jobycom]

60. Woooshhhh....

Feel that breeze tickling your hair folicles on the way by?

[Name removed]

58. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Raineyb]

61. Your bigotry is not as veiled as you think it is. n/t

[uncommon]

68. I think they got it out of their system already.

Plenty of blood on those hands.

[blondeatlast]

8. The ad isn't clever beyond its shock value, but I sure as hell don't like the idea that the

government put the kibosh on it.

[Retrograde]

25. and they don't know what immaculate conception means

In RC doctrine, the immaculate conception refers to Mary having been born without the taint of original sin, making her different from all other humans. What the ad means to refer to is the virgin birth of Jesus. Not the same thing.

If you're going to poke fun at anything, get your facts right.

[LaurenG]

9. I can see why that would offend Catholics. nt

[cyndensco]

20. As a non-practicing Catholic for the past 30+ years, I agree.

Maybe I'm too PC, perhaps too sensitive, but why go there?

[Name removed]

59. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[blueamy66]

64. +1

I agree.

[Javaman]

67. Also as a non-practicing catholic...

who cares?

Pointing it out just creates more controversy, thus more revenue for the product and more face time in the news.

The churches "outrage" does more to help the Ice company than anything.

Nothing like free advertising.

If they let it be, it would have vanished without so much as a whisper.

[Liquorice]

+1

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

10. Were actual catholics actually offended?

Or just the Bill Donohue types?

[old mark]

12. I was a cradle catholic, and attended catholic school through High School, and

one year of college.

What really offends me is the church itself.

I love ice cream.

mark

[LeftinOH]

13. And dozens of people have died in anti-ice cream riots in Catholic countries because of it...

Oh, wait.

[jobycom]

51. Like, newspapers in Christian countries willingly pulled the offensive blasphemy of the Prophet

to avoid insulting their deepest religious beliefs, right?

Amazing the disconnect when one belongs to the dominant culture.

[Ian David]

14. All she said was, "This ice cream is fit for Jehova."

[lapislzi]

15. I can certainly understand why Catholics might be offended

but I wouldn't support censorship in any form. There's plenty of images and opinion that annoy/offend me, but I do my best to look the other way. I also have the right to complain (lotta good it may do me).

Yeah, we all still have the right to be insensitive jerks. And most of us exercise that right from time to time, self included.

[mjane]

26. That right doesn't exist in England

It hasn't for years. Ditto for Canada, and most of Europe.

They have hate speech laws, vilification of religon laws, etc. (varies by nation of course).

France has such laws, the UK, Canada, etc.

It's a troubling thing, imo.

[xchrom]

16. what? there's never, ever in the long history of the church been a pregnant nun? nt

[Vickers]

17. I'd hit it.

The ice cream, I mean.

[damntexdem]

18. Most likely, it was Cardinal Federici.

;-)

[truebrit71]

19. Stupid ad..everyone knows the only way to get a nun knocked up is to dress her up as a choir boy...

..:evilgrin:

[GoneOffShore]

35. Thank you - will you be here all week?

:-)

[m00nbeam]

55. Oh yes, because jokes about pedophilia in the Catholic clergy

are just a laugh riot.

x(

[truebrit71]

63. Oy vay..

..lighten up Francis...

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

21. This just helps Jesuits to recruit suicide bombers

I'd shout about the 1st amendment, but not sure if Britain has such a thing.

:hi:

[mjane]

27. Not even close

The UK has all sorts of laws that infringe on speech that would not be possible in the US. Simply put, they have less freedom of expression. Ditto Canada, France, and most of Europe.

[mjane]

23. Again, our speech laws are better

Many European countries allow prosecutions for vilification of religion, etc. A Quran or Bible burning wouldn't be legal there, either.

This is just another example of their overreaching limits on free speech.

[Lucian]

28. Pedophilia offends me more than this ad.

This ad doesn't even make it on my radar.

[Iggo]

29. er, durr.

[SargeUNN]

30. Can we ban religion totally because I am offended by

the Southern Baptist, Mormans, Catholics, and every other religion on the face of the earth?

[Iggo]

31. yOU GO TOO FAR, sIR!!!!

:crazy:

[SargeUNN]

32. actually religion goes too far

when they quit going after gays, airing freaks like Neil Bortz on their radio network, and stops their hatred of certain people then I will retract my statement, but as of this moment religion is offensive to me because it is corrupt.

[GoneOffShore]

34. I'd have to agree with you there.

And when it stops trying to push ID in place of science.

[WinkyDink]

46. Including Islam?

[blueworld]

36. I would think anyone over 8 yrs old with a modicum of taste would be offended by this stuff n/t

[WinkyDink]

45. Is Christianity more mockable than is Islam?

[jobycom]

52. Dunno, but apparently it's better able to get the media to support them.

The blasphemous ads that upset Muslims run over and over, and Westerners say "Wow, they just need to accept our values and get over their own." When it's a Christian that's offended, though, the offense is retracted and apologized for, the offender is fired, and Westerners all smile in their self-righteous superiority and say "See how much better we handle it than Islam?"

[Rage for Order]

54. Britain banned piggy banks because they caused offense to Muslims

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article102182.ece

Published: 01 Oct 2005

Workers in the benefits department at Dudley Council, West Midlands, were told to remove or cover up all pig-related items, including toys, porcelain figures, calendars and even a tissue box featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet.

Bosses acted after a Muslim complained about pig-shaped stress relievers delivered to the council in the run-up to the Islamic festival of Ramadan.

Councillor Mahbubur Rahman, a practising Muslim, backed the ban. He said: "It's a tolerance of people's beliefs."

[jobycom]

56. Sorry, but debunked.

http://www.gavpolitics.co.uk/blog/2005/10/09/pig-ban-the-media-is-to-blame/

A member of staff in one department did, indeed, complain that the presence of rubber stress toys in the shape of a pig were offensive in the run up to Ramadan. The employees departmental manager, in line with the Councils employment and equal opportunities policies (based on legislation from Central Government) was obliged to give due regard to the complaint and asked other staff in the department if they would consider keeping the toys out of sight. Another member of staff obviously thought it would be ‘fun’ to tell the press. In common with most media, the Express and Star decided to inflate the story into a wholesale ban of all pig images. This then got picked up by national newspapers and hey presto a great politicallly correct attack is in progress. Made even better by the fact that it is a Conservative administration.

The AA Milne tissue box is probably the result of office chit-chat. I can hear it now, “Huh, I suppose my box of tissues with a picture of piglet on is offensive as well!”

snip

The serious point here is that what started out as an internal issue relating to one employee in a small department of an organisation employing thousands has now, through media exaggeration, given any extreme racist group another flag to pin to the mast and may well have created an impression among sections of the white population that there is some hidden agenda within the establishment to pander to prejudice from one section of our community at their expense. This is not only untrue but dangerous, made worse by the fact that it was totally unnecessary.

[HEyHEY]

57. This religion says I'll burn in hell for not being part of it, why do I care if I "offend" them?

[blueamy66]

65. Where did you hear that?

Through my 13 years of Catholic education, I was never taught that...and still don't believe it to this day.

You've got the Catholics mixed up with the holy roller non-denom Christians. You know, the Bible literalists....