Telethon, a French television show, is an icon of popular entertainment, an outpouring of visual jollity and charitable fund-raising. But this year it turned into a battleground over religion and public life. A few days before the event, the Archbishop of Paris unleashed a missile: the telethon is fine, he said, except when it raises money for the destruction of human embryos (ie, for stem-cell research). On a continent where bio-ethical questions are usually debated by committees of experts behind closed doors, this blast from a religious leader against mass-market television had an unexpected whiff of America's notorious "culture wars", in which Christians and secularists man the barricades over moral matters.
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