Offensive advertising

While driving home last evening, Nancy and I saw a billboard advertising the recently launched Puretracks.com, the first legally licensed service in Canada for downloading popular music from the internet. Nancy had seen it earlier in the day, and she called my attention to it then.

The billboard showed a woman dressed as a nun. Or, perhaps I should say, she was wearing part of a nun's habit, but enough of her torso was uncovered to solicit what might quaintly be called prurient interest on the part of particularly male viewers.

We couldn't help but wonder whether the company would do the same thing with, say, a muslim woman in a headscarf. Would they dare to use the symbols of Judaism in the same way? If they did, they would unleash a firestorm of bad publicity amid general charges of religious bigotry. For some reason, in this country Roman Catholics are regarded as fair game for this sort of thing. I hope someone complains.