Losing Their Religion

Regarding right wing Christians putting their embryos up for adoption and insisting they not be adopted by gays or non-Christians (preferably not a working woman either) AMERICAblog wonders how this Bush promoted religious discrimination can get past the editors of the NY Times unaddressed.

I’ll tell you how:

Though we have our lapses, (pdf) individual news stories on emotional topics like abortion, gun control, the death penalty and gay marriage are reported and edited with great care, to avoid any impression of bias. Nonetheless, when numerous articles use the same assumption as a point of departure, that monotone can leave the false impression that the paper has chosen sides. This is especially so when we add in our feature sections, whose mission it is to write about novelty in life. As a result, despite the strict divide between editorial pages and news pages, The Times can come across as an advocate.

The public editor found that the overall tone of our coverage of gay marriage, as one example, “approaches cheerleading.” By consistently framing the issue as a civil rights matter — gays fighting for the right to be treated like everyone else — we failed to convey how disturbing the issue is in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life.

[…]

Too often we label whole groups from a perspective that uncritically accepts a stereotype or unfairly marginalizes them. As one reporter put it, words like moderate or centrist “inevitably incorporate a judgment about which views are sensible and which are extreme.” We often apply “religious fundamentalists,” another loaded term, to political activists who would describe themselves as Christian conservatives. …

The editors didn’t fail. They succeeded. They “re-framed” the issue of religious discrimination and gay rights. They are simply being “sensitive” and “conveying how disturbing the issue us in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life” when they uncritically report on a White House endorsed publicly funded group that enables Christian bigots to discriminate even though it’s clearly against the law.

I think it’s time we called out the PC police on the wingnuts. Nobody likes political correctness, not even liberals, really. And our day is long past. This is the new province of the right and they have finally hammered the press into thinking that discrimination and bigotry are really just normal expressions of religious belief and must be treated with kid gloves. I call bullshit every time one of these timorous cowards clutch their tiny lace hankies and blubber something about how they are being sensitive to the beliefs of bigoted assholes.

Just in case James Dobson and his new friends, the intellectuals at the NY Times, have forgotten their eighth grade American history class, Confederates used the Bible to justify slavery, too. Bin Laden uses the Koran to justify terrorism. Just because they wrap themselves in the Holy Books doesn’t mean these theo-fascists they aren’t breaking the laws of both God and Man.

For a more in depth analysis of the NY Times “credibility” report, see Reading A1
.