Ice cream company Antonio Federici has had an advert showing a pregnant nun banned by the ASA for mocking the beliefs of Roman Catholics. Nice one Federici - I’d never heard of Antonio Federici ice cream before and now it’s imprinted on my mind due to 8 complaints and the actions of the ASA.
However. it’s obvious (at least to me) that this advert set out to purposely court controversy ahead of the Pope’s visit and thus protestations of justification by the company are driven by a marketing agenda – the same agenda pastor Terry Jones had with his Qur’an burning ploy.
Apparently there are still thousands of unsold tickets for the Pope’s gig in Scotland. Perhaps he should invited Terry Jones over to the event and get him to do a bit of Qur’an burning. That’ll certainly draw the crowds.
It is said that one in five children in the UK are being wrongly labelled as having special needs. If you ask me, far too many are being wrongly labelled as having 5 A* grades.
A prisoner in Wiltshire escaped in a get-away tractor while working on the outside. There was a low-speed police chase at 20 MPH before he was caught after a 10 mile crawl in which he was blocking a long queue of cars trying to get to Devises.
2 comments:
Why can't we mock Catholic beliefs? they mock hard won secular ethics (like equal rights for Woman) on a daily basis!
It makes you wonder, are their deeply held convictions so insecure that they cannot even bear the humour of a few secular ice-cream consumers?
What a bunch of raspberry ripples..
Steve: It's not that you can't make fun of a religion's beliefs, it's just that it's against the Advertising Standards Agencies guidelines to do so. In other words, individuals are free to do so (and let's face it, you do all the time!) but companies should not be able to trade on bigotry or discriminatory content for commercial gain.
Even if you don't respect this in the context of religious belief, I hope you would respect it in the case of (say) race or ethnicity. The two cases generalise to the same condition along standard human rights legislative concerns.
(Personally, I suspect there are many Catholics who would have been amused by this campaign, but never mind).
Chairman:
"It is said that one in five children in the UK are being wrongly labelled as having special needs. If you ask me, far too many are being wrongly labelled as having 5 A* grades."
Just had to say that this paragraph totally cracked me up! :D
Post a Comment