La Vanguardia's house intellectual, Baltasar Porcel, former official Catalan candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, is in New York. He says in his column today,

On Sunday mornings the television stations are full of Christian preachers, mostly blacks with an ostentatious appearance, while the whites dress out of department stores and speak in falsetto. They all perform in amphitheaters packed with the faithful, the blacks with an enthusiasm that is a little crazy, and the whites with a seriousness that is a little cretinous.

Now wait a minute. In the wake of the Mohammed cartoons kerfuffle, didn't we agree that we were going to respect one another's religions and not say things that might hurt anyone's feelings? Oops, that only counts for Muslims. It's okay to call American Christians "crazy" and "cretinous" after watching Sunday morning TV for fifteen minutes, though, and it's even more okay to make superficial racial differentiations among them.

The reason that it's okay to patronizingly condescend to American Christians, of course, is that nobody is afraid they're going to riot and burn embassies and kidnap foreigners and set off bombs and kill people over pathetic little slights made by ignorant fools like Baltasar Porcel.