2 NBC affiliates refuse to air controversial ‘Book of Daniel’; show said to mock Christ – (BP)

Conservative groups including the American Family Association and Focus on the Family have urged supporters to contact their local NBC affiliates to protest the show, which stars a drug-addicted Episcopal priest who has a wife who downs mid-day martinis, a 23-year-old son who is a homosexual Republican, a 16-year-old daughter who sells marijuana and a 16-year-old adopted son who is having sexual relations with the bishop’s daughter.

I saw this last night , and my most ‘offended moment’ came when the parent of the adopted son’s girlfriend matter-of-factly mentions how the son was laying on “My Jag”; and at the time, I didn’t know this character is the bishop.

Waliszewski said in a statement on the Focus on the Family website Jan. 5 that Jesus is made to look like a “wimpy, white-robed visitor who cares little about evil, addictions and perversity. This Christ glosses over a teenager’s sexual romps with a ‘He’s a kid, let him be a kid.’”

“I doubt NBC would consider portraying a Muslim cleric or Buddhist monk in the same light. And rightly so,” Waliszewski added. “Why? Because to do so would be mean-spirited and insensitive. But for some reason, portraying Jesus as a namby-pamby frat-boy-guru is fine. I’m extremely disappointed that NBC has chosen to air this program.”

The “casual attitude” I am uncomfortable with is the lifestyles of the characters. (the “jag”. the extremely “upper class” setting of the whole cast, and taking offense at a Jesus who is casual and flippant about “loose morals” that don’t include taking offense also at a “bishop” who blithely bags about his “jag”. The Jesus character is not a surprise, since this after all, is a TV SHOW. They’re going for laughs and the “irreverent edge” is where it is usually found for the general audience.

As for the “I doubt NBC would consider portraying a Muslim cleric or Buddhist monk in the same light. And rightly so,” I say that Muslim clerics or Buddhist monks are not the majority in this country. If they were, and they took the same flippant, clueless tact that the American media takes toward Christianity , they’d be casting “offensive”, “edgy” Muslim characters, and being “politically sensitive” toward the minorities. I believe the real “attack” on Christianity comes in the assumptions that the “bishop’s” “Jag” (and probaly countless other things, like the entirely unquestioned, comfortable living in what looks a lot like a “gated community”—- I only saw the one episode last night……and oh yeah, the “bishop’s wife” is a bigot, stating that she didn’t plan on having any oriental grandchildren. What kind of bishop gets married to someone with that attitude? I guess someone who goes around dropping that he has “a Jag”)

Of course, those things are not the sort of thing at which the Southern Baptist press takes offense. They want Jesus to be “angry and condemning” and dispaly the sort of smug arrogance as they do toward “impurity”.

I don’t think I’ll be having this show on my schedule, although I’ll probably have to linger on on it now and then when I’m channel surfing on Friday night.