Well, I guess I have to add Ally McBeal to the list of shows I refuse to watch in silent protest of content.

Maybe this time I'll actually write a letter to Fox television.

In case you missed it, it was a classic case of stereotyping. The target was Catholic priests and nuns.

Ally McBeal, (who plays an attorney on television when she's not denying she suffers from anorexia as Calista Flockhart in real life) defends a nun who was fired because she had sex with a man. (Hey, anybody know any good anorexia jokes?)

The nun says she feels she was discriminated against because she was a woman. During testimony, she offers this jewel. I am paraphrasing here, but it's real close: "The priest had sex with a boy and got a transfer."

Later in the show, McBeal goes into the confessional and admits that she's only about a quarter Catholic. The priest hears her confession nonetheless and she tells him all about this great one-night stand she had with this guy who was "big." She then uses the name of the Lord in vain and asks, "Am I forgiven?"

Later in the show, the nun gets reinstated when the church discovers the priest Ally confessed to has been videotaping sexy confessions. He plans to leave the church and start up his own sex talk TV show.

This is some serious humor, eh?

I happen to be a Catholic, but that's really not what this is all about. It goes beyond that.

It goes to the issue that it is still OK in this great land to discriminate against or stereotype Christians.

I'll bet you've seen it so many times on television it goes right by you. You don't even notice. It's just the way it is.

There are exceptions, but generally, anybody in a clerical collar on television is either a money-grubber or a fool (if he's Protestant) or a pervert or a misfit (if he's Catholic).

Christians are routinely stereotyped as narrow-minded, judgmental Bible thumpers lacking in compassion, tolerance and intelligence.

Television mogul Ted Turner, quoted by the TV critic of the Dallas Morning News, stated, "Christianity is religion for losers."

Turner has an absolute right to his opinion. That's free speech. But if he said that about Jews or Muslims, it would have been labeled hate speech.

None of this would bother me if we could somehow be on a level playing field.

I'm not thin-skinned. I know a few good Catholic jokes. I am not averse to poking a little fun once in awhile.

The thing that bothers me is that if I poke fun at the wrong bunch of people - which is virtually anybody - I am labeled some type of social deviant. The political correctness cops would bust me in a minute.

But put down some people of faith, now, hey, there's some solid acceptable humor. Everybody knows you have to be a little bit stupid to believe all that Biblical nonsense, right?

And Christians just shrug and go on their merry way. Where's the outrage? Where's the debate?

We had a debate raging in this country over whether it was politically correct to name sports teams "Redskins" or "Braves" or "Warriors" because it was an unfair stereotype against Indians, I mean, Native Americans. Some teams actually changed their names.

I thought the debate was lame, but we had the debate.

Right here in this county we had a North Webster schoolteacher almost lose her job for "racial stereotyping" that wasn't nearly as offensive as what I saw on Ally McBeal.

So why is there no debate about stereotyping Christians?

It is true that there have been some accusations of pedophilia among Catholic clergy. There was one high-profile "repressed memory" accusation against a Cardinal, but the accuser later recanted.

These incidents, while isolated, received lots of media attention.

I have never seen any studies or statistics. I could be completely wrong about this, but I would be surprised to see the molester per capita rate among Catholic priests to be way out of whack compared to the rest of the population.

I have, in 17 years in this business, seen hundreds of molester arrests in the paper. I have yet to see a priest or pastor arrested.

I realize there is a certain higher expectation of moral conduct among clergymen that makes a charge of molesting against them seem more shocking and heinous - and rightly so.

But does this mean that a stigma must be attached to all clergy and bandied about on primetime television as humor?

The furor in the media over priests and pedophilia has died down now. The reports have stopped. I guess priests must have learned to suppress their urges because of the bad PR.

But even though the controversy has died down, the stigma remains.

Probably more troubling to me than the episode itself was the reaction of some of my Christian colleagues.

One of them, while watching a videotaped rerun of the nun's "The priest had sex with a boy" line gave me one of those "Wellll?" reactions as if to say the nun had a pretty good point.

When I said I thought that it was pretty vicious of Fox to stereotype priests and nuns as sexually dysfunctional perverts, another of my very politically correct colleagues told me I was overreacting.

Oh, really?

Would I be overreacting if I criticized a television show for stereotyping Jews, Muslims, blacks, Indians or gays?

All I ask is equal treatment.

Let the political correctness police start patrolling the Christian neighborhoods, too, or let them turn in their badges. [[In-content Ad]]