Monday, March 13, 2006 |
16:27 - A teaching moment
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/11812699/
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A lot of us saw this coming, but the timing is pretty excellent.
NEW YORK - Isaac Hayes has quit “South Park,” where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.
Hayes, who has played the ladies’ man/school cook in the animated Comedy Central satire since 1997, said in a statement Monday that he feels a line has been crossed.
“There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins,” the 63-year-old soul singer and outspoken Scientologist said.
And Parker and Stone, over to you:
Stone told The AP he and co-creator Trey Parker “never heard a peep out of Isaac in any way until we did Scientology. He wants a different standard for religions other than his own, and to me, that is where intolerance and bigotry begin.”
It is left as an exercise for the alert reader to substitute the names of certain other religions that might or might not be in the news lately.
So, hey, Europe: here we've got a neat little cartoony microcosm of where your appeasement politics will get you, and of the ignominious end that the noble and tragically doomed ideal of freedom of speech will meet if criticism of beliefs and ideas is stifled. Hope you're comfortable with the path you're on, because it might well be too late to turn back.
Meanwhile, Trey and Matt for President.
Via evariste.
UPDATE: Today's lunch discussion contained a proposal that maybe Iran should publish cartoons denigrating Scientology. Then we could all just sit back and watch the fun!
UPDATE: More from Ann Althouse, including this interesting tidbit from "Fresh Air" in 2004:
[A]ctually with Chef--Trey and I were doing all the voices, and we actually--me or Trey wanted to do that voice. We were going to be like, 'Hey, what's going on, children?' and just kind of do that voice ourselves. And we were going to pitch it down, so it was really, really low, like an older black man's voice, how they can just be really, really low. And we wanted to do it ourselves. At the time Comedy Central was like, 'You can't do that.' And it's kind of true in a lot of Disney cartoons and a lot of other cartoons, they won't let their gender--Their gender?--race specific with the voiceover; they won't allow a white person to do a black person's voiceover. They probably don't care the other way. But at the time they were like, 'You know, you need to have a black person do this.' And we were like, `Well, you know, we have this character who sings all these soul songs.' I was like, 'Why don't we get ...(unintelligible)?'
Nowadays, post-Team America, Trey and Matt can voice whatever racial caricature they want to. I'm starting to think Chef isn't going anywhere soon—and he might just get better than he ever was before.
Lesson to those who would cry blasphemy, then: You can be voted off the island.
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