No fairy tales here

It seems that the BBC has censored The Pogue's "Fairytale of New York" for fear of offending homosexuals.

The offending lines are:

You scumbag, you maggot you cheap lousy faggot,
Happy Christmas your arse I pray God It's our last.

The Beeb, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the term "faggot" needs to be bleeped for fear they offend the gay community.

What a load of politically correct garbage!!

Has anybody actually asked the gay community if they feel offended? Given that the song is 20 years old I'm fairly sure that, with the possible exception of a few gay Mary Whitehouses, they don't give a rat's arse. If they did I'm sure we'd have heard about it before now as the song appears on just about every Christmas compilation from the last 20 years and is played to death every Christmas regardless of whether there is a campaign to get it to the #1 slot or not.

Interestingly, Marrion Webster defines it as follows:

Main Entry: fag·got
Pronunciation: \ˈfa-gət\
Function: noun
Etymology: earlier and dialect, contemptuous word for a woman or child, probably from 1fagot
Date: 1914

usually disparaging : a male homosexual

So it was originally an unpleasant name for a woman or child - perhaps Auntie is being sensitive about the wrong demographic.

Apart from that what about these lines:

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed

Can we really let that "old slut on a junk" line contribute the the moral bankruptcy of our once great nation. Is it not offensive to sluts? Failing that is it not encouraging children to become sluts? Or something else bad, and involving children to make it seem worse?

On a completely unrelated note, here is the link to the BBC complaints page, should anybody feel the urge to comment on anything over the festive season.