I don't know if anyone saw the vanity card from the end of tonight's episode of How I Met Your Mother. If you didn't this is what it said:

Well, wouldn't ya' know it. Just two episodes back from the strike and I've already managed to write a vanity card that is completely unacceptable to the good folks at CBS. I wasn't trying to offend. Honest. I just saw an opportunity to poke some proverbial fun, to knosh on the hand that feeds, if you will. They were not amused. If you would like to read my latest exercise in poor judgement, I'm sure you can find it somewhere on that thing we writers were striking to claim dominion over. Just to be on the safe side, I apologize in advance. Please know that my aim was only to provoke a bit of gaiety through the judicious use of a little thing I like to call "the truth." Unfortunately, in the television business, the truth rarely sets anyone free. More often than not, it just pisses them off.

I wanted to know what the original vanity card said, so I went to Chuck Lorre's website. Here's the original version of the vanity card:

In tonight's episode we explored the subject of lying to avoid hurting someone's feelings. During the climactic final scene, the character of "Cousin Leo" blamed his fabricated drug addiction on having been molested in the Philippines by an equally fabricated Naval officer named Chaplain Horrigan. In the original shooting script the make-believe molester was called Father Horrigan. CBS strongly objected to this. Their concern was that Catholic viewers would be offended by any suggestion that a Catholic priest would molest a child. I argued that several billion dollars in punitive damage payments established a reasonable link between priests and diddled kids. My argument fell on deaf ears (no offense to our hearing-impaired viewers). Outraged, I decided I was an eight-hundred pound gorilla and threatened to shoot the scene as written. Their lawyers, eight-pound spider monkeys at best, threatened to cut it. I immediately blinked and changed the word "father" to "chaplain." CBS's problem went away. Apparently, a non-denominational, drunken pedophile is inoffensive. But more importantly, our Catholic viewers did not get their feelings hurt.

I think Lorre was right to stand up to the censorship, but I can't blame him for giving in. So soon after the strike, you don't want to rock the boat any more than you have to. But I give him a lot of credit for deciding to post this on the Internet anyway, since CBS could still take him to task over it.

Lorre makes a good point: It is public knowledge that the Catholic Church had a history of molesting kids. I can't imagine that using that fact in the show would offend Catholics even more than they were already offended by their priests. And let me be frank, I am not trying to slam Catholics here, just stating a point that the censorship was unnecessary.

So thank you, Chuck Lorre, for bringing this to our attention. I'm much better educated for it.