Cold Case, the forensic drama about a police division that specializes in investigating old and unsolved crimes, recently caught the attention of the Culture & Media Institute, which claims that a particular episode of the CBS series offensively portrayed Christians.

The conservative group, which aims “to advance, preserve, and help restore America’s culture, character, traditional values, and morals against the assault of the liberal media,” even described the episode entitled “That Woman,” which aired on September 30, as “a ham-handed attempt to influence this fall’s congressional debate on abstinence education programs.”

In the said episode, Cold Case featured an unsolved murder of young woman with a promiscuous past who joins a Christian-based abstinence group in an effort to change her life, only to discover that the members are sexually active hypocrites who literally stone a member to keep their sins secret.  The controversial episode also featured a youth pastor encouraging a girl to “confess” her impure dreams to him as he masturbates.

“When’s the last time your local Christian youth group stoned somebody to death,” Culture and Media Institute’s Colleen Raezler said in an article that accuses CBS of “taking cheap shots at abstinence education.”

“Hollywood likes to claim their programming simply reflects reality, but the latest episode of Cold Case was an exercise in bigoted, Christophobic fantasy,” she added.

Meanwhile, “That Woman” isn’t that only episode of Cold Case that has offended the conservative group.  According to the director of the Media Research Center’s Culture and Media Institute, Robert Knight, the show also caught their attention with the broadcast of the episode “Running Around,” which is about a case of a missing Amish girl who was murdered while she was in Philadelphia experiencing the Amish rite of passage called “rumspringa”.  Knight says that CBS’ timing is dreadful, given that the said episode aired on the same week that marks the one year anniversary of the massacre of five Amish girls and the wounding of five others in a Pennsylvania school in October 2006.

“The makers of Cold Case seem to have a fetish for linking Christians and murder.  We’re not accusing the Cold Case makers of being insensitive. We’re accusing them of acting hatefully toward religious believers,” Knight said.

“CBS still owes an apology to Christians, youth pastors, and abstinence educators for last week’s abominable program,” he added.

-Kris De Leon, BuddyTV Staff Columnist
Source: TV.com
(Image courtesy of CBS)

Kris De Leon

Staff Writer, BuddyTV