In what well may have been a state-sponsored compromise, the organizers were found guilty but not sentenced to prison.

My congratulations to the Russian Orthodox Church. That reactionary institution survived the 20th century Bolshevik storm and is now back in business at the same old stand–claiming special privileges from the Russian government, doing its best to reunite church and state, battling both religious heresy and political dissent in a country with no tradition of legal tolerance for either, and waging a campaign to suppress the proselytizing of other religions. Bad ideas and institutions never really die; they merely hiberate until they they can speak lies in the name of power again.

Last week, a guilty verdict was handed down by a Moscow court against organizers of an art exhibition that satirized both religion and the materialism of the new Russia. Included in the 2007 exhibition was an image of Jesus juxtaposed against McDonald’s golden arches and the tagline, “This is my body.”

It was also possible to view Christ through peepholes where the savior held up a bottle of Coca-Cola and proclaimed, “This is my blood.” One work tweaked Islam as well. Titled “Chechen Marilyn,” the painting depicted a veiled woman with her burqa billowing up–homage to the famous scene in the movie Some Like It Hot.

The organizers were convicted of inciting religious and ethnic hatred and handed substantial fines, but they were not sent to prison–an advance, to be sure, over the much harsher Soviet justice doled out to dissidents.