Shorter Charles McVety: “WAAAHHHHHHH!”:
An evangelical minister says his television show’s content will now be “pre-screened and censored” after his remarks about homosexuals drew complaints that were investigated by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. […]
The Word TV statement released Wednesday also criticized the CBSC’s “heavy hand of censorship” and the way it investigates complaints and makes decisions.
Comparing the CBSC practices to “the Salem witch trials” and to “Josef Stalin’s Show Trials,” Word TV said the organization did not give programs the opportunity to defend themselves.
Well, here we go. As heartwarming as it is to see Mullah McVety’s deranged on-air diatribes earning him a long-overdue boot to whatever he’s got that passes for nads, it was inevitable that it would prompt his hideous metamorphosis into “St. Chuck”, free speech martyr Silenced by the Powers-That-Be and the Rainbow Jackboot of Persecution.
And suddenly the air thickens like frozen snot as it’s heavily permeated by the foul fragrance of BULLSHIT. Airwick, stat!
To be clear, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council found McVety in violation of some of their rules. Whether one agrees with the reach of regulatory agencies like the CBSC is another debate — they are what they are, and McVety isn’t so special that he shouldn’t have to play the game by the same rules as every other Canadian broadcaster. If McVety considers what the CBSC does to be a kind of government or bureacratic overreach*, he should lobby to get it shut down so he can jabber away unhinged and unfettered. (*As Antonia notes in the comments, the CBSC is an independent, self-regulating non-governmental council made up of private broadcasters. However, McVety’s language in complaining about them seems lifted straight from past complaints about agencies like HRCs, no doubt by design.)
But McVety doesn’t really object to overreach, as long as it’s his overreach. And he certainly doesn’t oppose censorship, as long as he’s the censor. For instance…
There’s “blockchildporn dot ca“, McVety’s ongoing campaign to have to the government force cable companies to block any website that hosts kiddy porn. While child porn is indeed odious, the criminal code already has it covered and law enforcement regularly ferrets out its users and purveyors. Empowering government to dictate censorship to private cable companies seems like a convenient point of entry onto a slippery censorship slope — what else does McVety think the government should force cable companies to block? I can well imagine.
Then there was the new porno channel (are we sensing a trend here?) that was up for licensing a couple of years ago — a run of the mill adult porn channel, no kids or squids. But it was still more than the perpetually-aggrieved and sex-crazed McVety could tolerate, so he lobbied relentlessly against it, making feverish demands that the Harper government intervene to block its license. (Why does Charles McVety hate the free market?)
And let’s not forget Bill C-10, a piece of backdoor censorship legislation that was proudly championed by McVety, who bragged about being responsible for it. Ostensibly C-10 was to eliminate government funding for films deemed “objectionable” (by the likes of Charles McVety? That could mean just about anything including nature movies about gay penguins). Whether one agrees with the concept of taxpayer funding of the arts is another debate: Bill C-10 didn’t cut all arts funding, only specific “objectionable” projects, some with McVety-head-exploding titles like “Young People Fucking“. (In a classic case of false advertising, YPF wasn’t actually about young people fucking at all. But that didn’t stop McVety from chanting the title for months on end with obsessive-compulsive frequency, like some psychotic parrot — “Polly wanna Young People Fucking! BRAAAAK! Polly wanna Young People Fucking! BRAAAAAAAAK! BRAAAAK!” — spittle and drool at no extra charge.)
You get the drift. St. Chuck, Free Speech Martyr? Live by the sword, die by the sword.
