"Je-sus Christ."

Matt: "How did I get involuntarily deputized as a commandments enforcer?"

Danny: "By working in broadcasting."

Matt: "Nuh-uh, blasphemy isn't an FCC issue, there's no threat of fines."

Danny: "It's a community standards issue."

Matt: "But it's not my community we're talking about."

Danny: "You can't use the lord's name in vain, and that's not going to change and you know it, so move on."

Matt: "It's not my lord we're talking about either."

Danny: "We've had this conversation, and it bores me now."

Matt: "Look, it's one thing to be asked to respect someone else's religion, it's another to be asked to respect their taboos. In my religion it's disrespectful to god not to keep your head covered, but you don't see me insisting that the cast of CSI Miami wear yarmulkes."

Danny: "That'd be an unusual creative direction for CSI Miami."

Matt: "Half the shows in primetime start with two strippers getting strangled after a lap dance. And that's fine with me, but if it's also fine with Jesus than I don't see the need to tiptoe around his name."

Danny: "Matt, you'll be able to have a character tell another character to do something to himself that is anatomically impossible, you'll be able to do it at 8 o'clock on a Sunday before you'll be able to use God or Jesus as an expletive."

Matt: "I can only write Jesus or Christ when I'm referring to Jesus Christ!?"

Danny: "Yes."

Matt: "Let me tell you, if Jesus was the head of Standards and Practices he would pimp-slap the whole lot of us, and not because we used his name in....Jesus as the head of Standards and Practices!"

- Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Nevada Day, Pt. 1

by Thomas Schlamme and Aaron Sorkin

This is one of my favorite scenes from the short-lived series Studio 60 (a show about a late-night SNL-type show where all of the writing except that being performed on the fictional show was pretty awesome). The scene not only takes to task a ridiculous and discriminatory rule that I'm sure many people don't know even exists, but it does it in such a smart way that it's able to subvert the very restrictions that Studio 60 itself has to abide by. Aaron Sorkin...writing like this is the reason that The Social Network makes me sad.

What sucks is that this idea, the Jesus-as-head-of-Standards-and-Practices idea, which may have been the been the best sketch on Studio 60 (where the self-proclaimed and supposedly brilliant comedy writing was often not at all funny) got quashed and never aired (on the fictional Studio 60 - man, writing about this show is confusing). After the terrible-sounding "Crazy Christians" sketch was made such a fuss over, I wished we would have gotten a chance to see that insane mustachioed guy from Standards and Practices shitting a brick over this sketch (which is good! seriously, they do a read-through and the timing is brilliant).

Jesus! Getting back to the point...

I was recently watching commentary on an episode of The Office and Jenna Fischer made a comment about how they had to turn a "Jesus!" expletive into a "Sweet Jesus..." aside. The difference isn't initially clear to me, but I suppose the latter could come off more as a prayer or plea or whathaveyou. Anyway, I was surprised that this arcane rule still exists. I'd go into why this is ridiculous, but I think that Matt and Danny summed it up quite nicely. Something that continually infuriates me as an atheistic/agnostic American is that even today our system is set up for Christians. God is on our money, in our courtrooms, and in our pledge of allegiance. We keep "the lord's name in vain" off our airwaves and worry about losing advertisers because of the possible offensive nature of a gay kiss. And Fox News is able to continue to lie, deceive, and manipulate, unabated. Fox News is against my beliefs, but I don't see it being banned from the air or even being held to any journalistic standards whatsoever...

The second bit, the strippers-being-strangled hypocrisy, surprises me not at all. It's the same bullshit argument that allows Christians to eat shrimp, wear polyester, and yet hate queers. And we won't even get to all the people who came to Dr. Laura's defense for her hate-filled N-word rant (which, before you get all uppity, is a slur and not an expletive). Societally-determined moral offensiveness is clearly not subject to logic.

If this country is truly free, that means that the rest of us do not have to abide by the rules of any particular religion. This standard and others like it need to fall by the wayside as we progress as a society and recognize that the only thing driving us apart is hatred. If we could all just stop hating each other, have a little more respect and a little less rigidity, well...for one thing, the television would be a whole lot better.

Image via TV Squad