Mick Hartley

The offence bar is getting lower:

Comic Kathy Griffin’s “offensive” remarks about Jesus at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards will be cut from a pre-taped telecast of the show, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences said on Tuesday.

Griffin made the provocative comment on Saturday night as she took the stage of the Shrine Auditorium to collect her Emmy for best reality program for her Bravo channel show “My Life on the D-List.”

“A lot of people come up here and thank Jesus for this award. I want you to know that no one had less to do with this award than Jesus,” an exultant Griffin said, holding up her statuette. “Suck it, Jesus. This award is my god now.”

Asked about her speech backstage a short time later, an unrepentant Griffin added, “I hope I offended some people. I didn’t want to win the Emmy for nothing.”

The speech drew fire from a leading Roman Catholic group, the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, which condemned Griffin’s remarks as “obscene and blasphemous.”

“It is a sure bet that if Griffin had said, ‘Suck it, Muhammad,’ there would have been a very different reaction,” Catholic league president Bill Donohue said in a statement posted on the group’s Web site. He called on TV academy president Dick Askin to denounce Griffin’s “hate speech” and on Griffin to apologize.

That seems to me to be in effect an acknowledgement by Donohue that they’re following the Muslim example: no offence against religious sensibilities is to be tolerated.