Should Chris Cuomo and Stephanopoulos Be Fired for Their Religion? Or Quit Their Churches?

April 4th, 2015 1:21 PM

 Be careful what you wish for. So goes one of the older bits of human wisdom.

Question. If the O’Connor family of Walkerton, Indiana has been forced to close their family pizza business “Memories”, as noted here at TMZ, because their young daughter said in response to an unsolicited media question that the business wouldn’t cater a gay wedding because of their religious beliefs?  And the business has never, in fact, catered any wedding?  Then why shouldn’t this standard of questioning religious beliefs be applied to rich and famous liberal television anchors?

Witch hunts never end well. And the current media witch hunt in Indiana is fast becoming the work of, in the words of conservative and gay commentator Tammy Bruce, “fascist bullies.” Or, as Fox’s resident libertarian John Stossel put it, the push for gay marriage has moved from “tolerance to totalitarianism.”

Cases in point? The recent conduct of two prominent television anchors - CNN’s Chris Cuomo and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Neither of whom are young innocents at a family pizza parlor in Indiana.

As reported here in The Wrap, Cuomo said to Ryan McCann, policy director for the conservative Indiana Family Institute

“You cannot fix gay, do you understand that?” Cuomo fiercely said. “This is who these people are, it’s not just a choice, it’s not a lifestyle; these people say, ‘This is who I am, this is whom I love, this is how I think, this is how I feel, this is how I was born, do you understand that?”

Cuomo also lectured McCann to “own what you are.”

Over on ABC, Stephanopoulous was equally intolerant.  Among other things, in an interview with Indiana’s Governor Mike Pence the ABC anchor insistently said things like this:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So when you say tolerance is a two-way street, does that mean that Christians who want to refuse service, or if people of any other faith who want to refuse service to gays and lesbians, that's its now legal in the state of Indiana? That's a simple yes or no question.
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STEPHANOPOULOS: Final question. Final yes or no question governor. Do you think it should be legal in the state of Indiana to discriminate against gays or lesbians?
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STEPHANOPOULOS: Yes or no, should it be legal to discriminate against gays and lesbians?

The “be careful what you wish for” part of this media equation is quickly obvious.

Let’s illustrate with this story from Buzzfeed earlier this year. The headline:

           Fired Gay Catholic School Teacher Says He Is Quitting “Bigoted” Church

The story begins this way: “Lonnie Billard got an unexpected phone call over the holidays. It was an official from Charlotte Catholic High School, his employer, saying that he could no longer teach.”

Mr. Billard, who is gay, had announced he was marrying his significant other. The Catholic Church fired him from his job, and Billard is now quitting his church, saying it is bigoted.

What does this have to do with CNN’s Chris Cuomo? Mr. Cuomo is famously from a Roman Catholic family. According to the public record, as here in the New York Daily News, he was married in the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Catholic Church in Southampton, Long Island. And in the Catholic faith homosexual relations, not to mention gay marriage, is a sin. While gay activists have tried to imply the Pope is changing Catholic doctrine on the subject, in fact only a month ago the Pope was endorsing a referendum in Slovakia that would “block marriage and adoption rights for gay couples.” As Mr. Cuomo might say, the Pope is owning who the Catholic Church is - and has been for centuries.

And Mr. Stephanopoulos? George Stephanopoulos is a member of the Greek Orthodox Church.  As the New York Times reported, Stephanopoulos was not only married in the Greek Orthodox Church, the service was performed by his father, “the Rev. Dr. Robert G. Stephanopoulos, the dean of the Greek Orthodox Archidocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York.” George’s mother, Nikki, as noted here, was celebrated in 2008 for her “25 years of devoted service” to the Greek Orthodox faith.

The position of the Stephanopoulos faith, as seen here at the official web site of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America  is that homosexuality - let alone same-sex marriage - is “immoral.” Just last year, in this article in The Washington Post, Chicago public relations executive Gregory Pappas said he was denied even communion in a visit to his childhood Greek Orthodox church. Why?   “Because I am a gay man.” This being the denomination that is the Stepanopoulos family faith where, as noted by the Times, the ABC anchor’s father was, at the time of his son’s marriage, “the dean of the Greek Orthodox Archidocesan Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in New York.”  In other words, the anchor’s father was the dean in a church of a denomination where just last year a longtime member was denied communion “because I am a gay man.”

So. What do we have here, if we are to follow the media witch hunters down the path they have blazed in Indiana? What we have here are two well known network anchors who are members of, in the words of the gay Mr. Billard on the Catholic Church, a “bigoted” organization. And in the words of Mr. Pappas of the Greek Orthodox Church a faith that denies communion to gays.

Young Crystal O’Connor and her family are not given a pass when they say that they serve gays in their pizza shop, it’s just that they wouldn’t cater a wedding - something in fact they have never been asked to do in the first place for either gays or straights. This being the liberal media standard than there is no reason that the personal views of Cuomo and Stephanopoulos should be given a pass when in fact they belong to institutions that are actively upholding the very religious beliefs the O’Connor family is being targeted for holding.

The fact is that both Cuomo and Stephanopoulos were married in their respective churches, have and presumably still do belong to them, bringing up their children in the family faith. Even more to the point, since both men surely are making good salaries in their respective jobs, they can be reasonably suspected of contributing money to their churches. And both institutions are well on record opposing same-sex marriage and insisting homosexuality is a sin. To quote Mr. Cuomo, if the standard is  “own who you are” - than from the perspective of left-wing gay activists it is abundantly clear that Mr. Cuomo is owning a faith that is nothing but a citadel of the rawest bigotry.

And that’s before you even get to the issue of hypocrisy. Cuomo and Stephanopoulos are the media version of Apple’s CEO Tim Cook. Cook, who is both a gay man and has used his Apple pulpit to vociferously denounce Indiana - is doing Apple business with the decidedly homophobic Saudi Arabia where gays are executed or whipped with the lash. As reported here at Gateway Pundit, Apple is doing business in four countries - Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Uganda - where punishing or executing gays is the order of the day. Another high tech company, Salesforce, has said it will help move its employees out of Indiana.  CEO Marc Benioff calls the Indiana law “brutal and unjust.” What Benioff doesn’t say is that his company does business in one Middle Eastern country after another where homosexuality is illegal, with gays being executed, beaten or jailed. Is Benioff halting his business with these countries? Not a prayer. As with Cuomo and Stephanopoulos, hypocrisy reigns.

In light of all this utter media hypocrisy, shouldn’t Cuomo and Stephanopoulos be fired by CNN and ABC?  Just like the O’Connor family in Indiana was forced to close their pizza shop?  To borrow from the Obama mantra, wouldn’t this be fair? Unless both men are prepared  - as was the Catholic school teacher Mr. Billard - to publicly break with their church, label it “bigoted” and leave it and stop financing it - are they not aiding and abetting bigotry? And shouldn’t this be a firing offense? Isn't that a natural progression?

Shouldn’t Cuomo and Stephanopoulos be required to total up the financial contributions they have made to these institutions over the years and give an equal amount to some pro-gay marriage group as penance for financing what gay activists insist are bigoted institutions? Or better yet to the O’Connors? Note well that the O’Connor story was “reported” by an ABC affiliate - which is to say, the Stephanopoulos network. Shouldn’t both men, like the O’Connor family in Indiana, be paying a financial penalty for their actions?

After all, as noted over at the National Catholic Reporter,  the Catholic Church has been compared to “racists and sexists….(and ) hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan.” Surely Mr. Cuomo should not be a member of a Klan- ike church, should he? And for Mr. Stephanopoulos to be involved with a faith that refuses to give a gay man communion? With his father having played such a prominent role  in this religion, shouldn’t George Stephanopoulos have to pay some sort of penance as has the O’Connor family?

This would apply as well to other liberal media figures who belong to these faiths but have a double standard when it comes to their own religion. Think the Catholic Chris Matthews or the Catholic Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC. And if you think this is absurd, let’s recall the story from the last presidential election cycle in which the Roman Catholic MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell said of Mormon Mitt Romney that Romney belonged to a  “racist, pro-slavery, anti-American and otherwise inexplicable religion.” O’Donnell issued these anti-Mormon rants repeatedly, apologizing at one point after a barrage of criticism. Yet make no mistake. O’Donnell was saying on both MSNBC and NBC that Romney should not be president because of the history of his religious faith.

Well. If its not OK for a Mitt Romney to be president because of the Mormon Church’s historical views from a century ago? Then why isn’t it time to pull the plug on these two prominent network anchors who belong to two faiths that are being labeled as bigoted for views held not just a century ago but right this minute? America can’t very well have television anchors on major networks who are members of bigoted groups like that, can we?

What is the lesson here? Well aside from the fact that it is way past time for Christians to stand up for their faith and, among other things, defend institutions like the Catholic Church (and I am not Catholic) from these vicious anti-religious liberty assaults? It’s a lesson that shouldn’t be hard to grasp.

What we are seeing in the media firestorm over Indiana is the most blatant form of intolerance. A state of legendarily good and decent people was merely trying to protect the legal rights of its citizens to take their religious liberty case to court, hardly a radical notion. (It was the courts, recall, that have made gay marriage legal in the first place because gays had the constitutional right to sue.)  A good and decent small-town American family was simply running a pizza shop when an outlet from the national media walked in their door - apparently attracted by a religious sign in the window - dragging them in unwittingly to the national spotlight.

To borrow from Justice Clarence Thomas’s description of a similar media moment during his own confirmation hearing, the media treatment of Indiana and the O’Connor family of Walkerton has become a “high-tech lynching” of uppity religious liberty advocates. And it is worth noting that only a handful of years after the Thomas hearings - filled with furious liberals lecturing that “women tell the truth” and men just “don’t get it”  that these very arguments were, to the horror of the liberals who made them, turned against President Bill Clinton. A turnabout that resulted in Clinton’s impeachment and almost losing his presidency. As another old saying goes, aside from “be careful what you wish for” and “turnabout is fair play”? That would be “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”

In other words? Chris Cuomo and George Stephanopoulos and every other media liberal who is participating in this witch hunt or, to borrow the words of Tammy Bruce, becoming “fascist bullies” should be careful what they wish for. Or they may soon find Americans taking the word of gay activists that those who belong to religions that are now recast as citadels of bigotry should be fired as a result.

Starting with them.