I'm Pigging Sick Of This Kind Of Thing

Yesterday I found a "This just can't be right" story. Today it's just a "Oh, for God's sake !" one.

A children's story based on the Three Little Pigs has been turned down for an award, in part at least because its references to pigs may be offensive to Muslims.

The story comes on a CD-ROM (well, at least it doesn't contain the private information of 25 million people) and is in the form of an electronic pop-up book, aimed at primary school children.

It's called "Three Little Cowboy Builders". From what I can gather it tries to underline the importance of a good education, by casting the thee pigs as builders who try to build houses without knowing what they're doing. It's won a number of awards thus far, but when put in front of a government agency (of course) called Becta, it got the inevitable brush-off on the basis that the judges had "concerns about the Asian community and the use of pigs raises cultural issues".

If I still paid into my swear box this would have cost me serious money. The thing is, whenever I talk to Muslims about things like this, they say that they just find it embarrassing that people are trying to "protect" them in this way. I believe that whether it's trying to take the Christianity out of Christmas or abolishing references to pigs, most Muslims do not want to see people messing about with traditional English culture.