"A Catholic anti-defamation group is protesting the publication of three comic strips in a University of Virginia student newspaper that it says are offensive to Christians.

'We're calling them out on it,' said Kiera McCaffrey, a spokeswoman for the New York-based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. 'We'd like to see these type of cartoons stopped.'

One comic strip, which ran Aug. 23, depicts Jesus crucified on a mathematical XY-axis graph with the caption: 'Christ on a Cartesian Coordinate Plane.'

McCaffrey said the Catholic League asked for an apology from the paper Friday. It was rejected by Michael Slaven, the editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily.

Slaven, in an e-mail to The Times-Dispatch, said a policy dealing with censorship of comics or columns has been in place at the paper since April.

Slaven said that policy 'draws a distinction between stereotyping people and satirizing ideas that people have in their heads voluntarily. A comic saying 'all Catholics bomb abortion clinics' would not be allowed, but a comic that satirizes religious ideas -- including these -- is allowed. The fact that someone may find it controversial or offensive is not, by itself, a sufficient reason to censor anyone.'

Slaven said 'the First Amendment needs its champions most when the idea is controversial or unpopular.'

McCaffrey said several U.Va. students alerted the Catholic League to the comic strips.

A second comic strip, published Aug. 24, infers Jesus crashes a car, killing the woman passenger he was attempting to rescue. They both stand at heaven's gate with her cursing Jesus, who replies, using a coarse term, 'I ain't never drove.'

A third strip, also published on Aug. 24, has Joseph asking Mary 'how did you get that bumpy rash?' Mary answers: 'I swear, it was Immaculately Transmitted.'

All three comic strips were created by different student cartoonists.

'They're mocking the crucified Jesus,' McCaffrey said. 'And there's a insinuation of a sexually transmitted disease' in the comic strip with Mary.

McCaffrey said editors seem much more hesitant to print anti-Muslim cartoons than anti-Christian ones. Muslims were enraged after a Danish newspaper published cartoons last October making fun of the Prophet Muhammad.

'We were opposed to the anti-Muslim cartoons too,' McCaffrey said. 'You're still mocking people's beliefs.'

She noted that The Cavalier Daily, after being assailed by gay activists, issued an apology for a comic strip that ran in November of last year in which a character says a crane is 'the gayest-looking of all birds.'

'We want to highlight that hypocrisy,' she said. 'They believe it's OK to bash Christians in the paper but not gays. They clearly expressed regret for offending gays.'

Slaven, in his e-mail, said his predecessor published and issued the apology for the crane cartoon 'so I do not know the specific rationale for doing so.'

The Catholic League's mission is to protect individual Catholics and the church from defamation and discrimination, McCaffrey said.

She said the comic strips in The Cavalier Daily were 'not the worse we've seen on campuses by far.'" (Carlos Santos, Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 8, 2006)