After fatphobia, attacks for an alleged offense to religious feelings. The ultra associations Hazte Oír and Abogados Cristianos have announced that they will sue Lalachus, David Broncano and RTVE for the ‘Grand Prix’ image that the comedian brought out during the New Year’s Eve bells on television. “How long will they take advantage of our patience?” added, for his part, the archbishop of Seville, who considered this gesture “a mockery of the presenters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.”
What both the ultra organizations and the Seville archbishop overlook is that the image of the religious card with another face of a popular character has long been a kind of ‘viral meme’ among young people, accustomed to the joke that with that image they ‘venerate’ some public figure.
Among the best-known ‘pictures’ are those starring Belén Esteban, athletes such as Fernando Alonso, Leo Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo, or artists such as Lola Índigo, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny or Rosalía. This is what numerous users have remembered on Twitter.
Even the content creator Wall Street Wolverine, prominent informant within the ‘manosphere’ and spreader of far-right hoaxes, has shown on several occasions a picture with the face of El Fary.
Beyond the stamps as such, references or allusions to religious figures have been a constant in popular culture, and even in the press, for years. The images of Alaska and Mario Vaquerizo covering La Piedad in 2012 are famous, or the cover of presenter Jesús Vázquez as Jesus Christ two decades ago.
More recent is the case of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who during the 2020 pandemic posed as a mourning Virgin for the cover of the newspaper El Mundo, without that photo being problematic for the right at that time.
The image later became a meme, when networks placed a halo around Ayuso’s head, and it became part of a larger work that was exhibited at the Art Madrid 2021 fair. The ‘Pietà’ by the artist Silvia Flechoso It represented Ayuso as a Virgin Mary holding the dead body of a Jesus Christ transformed into the singer C. Tangana, accompanied by other artists such as Billie Eilish, Nathy Peluso or Rosalía.
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