Anti-Christian "Comic" Spews Sacrilege In Cavalier Daily (UVA)
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This article concerns two comic strips published August 23, 2006 and August 24, 2006 in The Cavalier Daily, the daily, student-run newspaper of the University of Virginia.
For the past two days in the Cavalier Daily, UVA's student-run newspaper, the new comic strip "Quirksmith" by Grant Woolard has presented a couple of fairly obscene, tasteless, anti-Christian messages.
The first comic, from yesterday, was a depiction of the Christ crucified on a Cartesian Plane, in was clearly a poor, rather juvenile attempt to provoke shock and outrage. Indeed, it may have provoked that in some people, but by itself I think it deserves nothing further than a big yawn.
Woolard's second "comic", however, goes far outside the Pale of general decency and good taste and decends into offensive sacrilege by depicting the Blessed Mother as having some form of venereal disease, presumably contracted from the Holy Spirit. This shows a shocking lack of sensitivity toward the many Christian students at UVA, in particular the large Roman Catholic communtiy, and, taken with his other strip, hints at a deep-seated hostility toward Catholicism and Christianity in general. Since only two strips from this young man have thus far been published, it is difficult to determine what exactly his motive was in publishing these two offensive comics, but if a pattern emerges, both he and the Cavalier Daily will have some serious questions to answer. I strongly suspect that were these strips targeting any other religious or ethnic group on Grounds, they would not have made it past the editor's desk, much less into the paper two days in a row. For a publication that has gotten itself into hot water over the contents of its comics (see here and here) in the past year, one would think that the Cavalier Daily would exercise more caution in the publication of "edgy" humor and satire. Appartently the budding journalists down in Newcomb Basement still have a lot to learn about sensitivity and good taste.
Cross-posted at Icythus