More Calls for Political Correctness

[Scott_Dredge@BayNetworks.COM (Scott Dredge)]

Catholics Target Ally McBeal 

There's good news and bad news for Calista Flockhart. The good news is that
attention has temporarily shifted away from the size of her waist and the
length of her skirts. The bad news is Ally McBeal has been hit with yet
another controversy. 

According to the Associated Press, a religious watchdog group is targeting
the hit Fox series for what it believes is an anti-Catholic bias. 

The Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights is fuming over Monday's
episode, in which Ally represents a nun who decides to sue the Catholic
Church after she loses her job for breaking her vow of celibacy. 

In a letter sent to Fox's chief executive for broadcasting standards
Wednesday, the group expressed concern for what it calls a "clear and
intentional pattern of Catholic bashing" on the show. 

Among the more colorful comments from the episode: Ally says that "nuns are
not supposed to have sex except with other nuns," while the nun in question
says, "A priest has sex with a boy, he gets transferred.… At least my lover
was of legal age." 

At the end of the show, which was written (as all the episodes are) by
series creator David E. Kelley, Ally learns that the nun's affair was
exposed because the priest in the church had installed video cameras in the
confessional. 

It turns out that the clergyman was taping the more sexually charged
disclosures as part of a documentary, which he sold to Fox as a "reality
special" titled The World's Naughtiest Confessions. The revelation makes
Ally literally turn gray, since she had earlier decided to confess her sins. 

During her confession, Ally talks about an encounter she had with a
particularly well-endowed young man, prompting the priest to wonder whether
size really does make a difference. 

"I can't imagine anyone getting away with saying this if it were any other
religious group," says Gergory Coiro, a Los Angeles priest who worked as a
script consultant on the short-lived ABC series Nothing Sacred-another
series targeted by the Catholic League. He called the show's humor
"insulting and very demeaning." 

And this isn't the only complaint leveled against the show. The Catholic
League also took exception to the Sept. 28 episode, in which a Protestant
minister reveals he had an affair with one of his parishioners. "I realize
that doesn't make me an altar boy," he says. The response: "If you were an
altar boy, you'd be with a priest." 

For now, Fox and David E. Kelley Productions are keeping mum.