Kinky cash

Toronto Sun ^ | 2008-04-19 | Michael Coren

[Clive]

Kinky cash

Taxes should not continue to fund trashy shows watched by few

By MICHAEL COREN

I can't pretend to be a regular viewer of the television show Kink. The only episode I ever managed to catch featured a jolly 350-pound woman squeezed into a latex skirt and bra beating a similarly obese, if less jolly, man with a paddle. Entertaining enough I suppose but a little repetitive.

I mention this because the program in question is one of those that currently enjoys a tax credit. In other words, it receives public funding from you and me.

It is one of many Canadian television and movie documentaries and dramas that receive public funding and one of several dozen that seem obsessed with perversion, sadomasochism and large people in latex.

There also are some quality products that are given a tax credit, but the point about the government's proposed C-10 legislation is that it doesn't threaten anything that's any good. Only cheap trash watched by a handful of people who should really fund their pornography through their own pockets.

None of this, by the way, has anything to do with censorship. That is when the state forbids free speech and expression. Not when the state refuses to fund all speech and expression. But this distinction didn't stop various Canadian actors, led by permanently and professionally lugubrious Sarah Polley, from visiting Ottawa where they explained that the mere "whiff of censorship" was enough to be revolting to them.

ALTERNATE TARGETS

Really? They should, then, be campaigning for magazines such as Maclean's and Catholic Insight, websites like Free Dominion and Five Feet of Fury and a whole bunch of journalists who are currently under attack by numerous federal and provincial Human Rights Commissions for indulging in genuine freedom of speech without any fatties in latex or government handouts.

But we all know that this has never been about defending freedom, but all about the chattering classes defending the right of people with whom they agree to exploit our absurdly generous public grants system.

Otherwise we would have to ask where Polley and her comrades were when Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura Schlessinger were removed from Canadian airwaves and why all those famous actors didn't support Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell when there was a concerted campaign to censor them in Canada.

They obviously didn't support these people's views. Fine. But the glorious essence of free speech is that it's supposed to apply to everybody and in particular to those who drive you crazy. I have no time for most of the anti-intellectual, tendentious perversion and bad acting that passes for entertainment in this country, but I'm not about to ban it. Nor, however, should I have to subsidize it.

Authentic censorship is a problem in Canada, but its champions are not Tories who want to cut taxes, but leftist students who ban university anti-abortion clubs, bureaucrats who persecute editors for publishing cartoons depicting Mohammad and arts councils which, for years, have funded only projects that fulfil their own left-liberal perceptions of what is acceptable.

FASCINATING STUFF

It always fascinates me how the first people to cry censorship when conservatives merely suggest a level playing field are just the sort of people who write letters to newspapers calling for people like, well, like me, to be fired. By the way, one movie that was given a grand tax credit by Ottawa was called The Masturbators.

Abuse yourself or abuse public money -- the same thing in the end.

[Clive]

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[elpadre]

Kinky Cash - hmmmm! how about crazy cash??

The US government is well known to have financed kinky art and other projects (some known as “earmarks”)

but the fact that the US government funds the Carter Center and thereby funds the former president working against the best interests of the US in Egypt by his supporting terrorists and their killing this week is pretty crazy, isn't it?

sort of like the US government and many state governments financially supporting Planned Parenthood's killing unborn babies! kinky, hmmm! - definitely crazy!!!

[dangus]

Actually, no relation to Johnny Cash.

[fanfan]