The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the organization that licenses EU television broadcasts and hosts the annual Eurovision Song Contest, has terminated its contract with a Chinese broadcasting company. The company, Mango TV, cut one of the songs from the contest’s broadcast—the gay-themed “Together,” by the Irish songster Ryan O’Shaughnessy, featuring two male singers holding hands. The decision is doubtless motivated by government authorities’ objection to open displays of same-sex attraction. The Chinese company’s censorship, sniffed the song contest’s organizers, is “not in line with the EBU’s values of universality and inclusivity and our proud tradition of celebrating diversity through music.”
It seems to us that if Chinese authorities are going to allow the extremely campy Eurovision Song Contest to be shown at all, they hardly have room to complain about the event’s easily perceptible gayness. On the other hand, it strikes us as rather priggish on the part of Western elites to censure a nation for doing what every European nation would have done until recently. But the progressive mindset has no patience with recalcitrance and no awareness of its own sanctimony.
