USA Today Religion Blogger Suggests Equivalence Between Oklahoma Anti-Sharia Law and Persecution of Christians Overseas

"The press... just doesn't get religion."

That quote by William Schneider is the motto of GetReligion.org, a blog devoted to critiquing the media penchant for biased, erroneous, or incomplete media reporting on religious news developments.

USA Today's Cathy Lynn Grossman seems to illustrate the wisdom of the quote in her January 3 Faith & Reason blog post linking back to none other than a January 2 Get Religion post.

On Sunday, Get Religion's Mollie Ziegler Hemingway concluded in the "Tragic new year for Egyptian Christians" that:

[T]he media are more focused on Islamophobia these days. But if Vatican reporter John Allen’s New Year prediction is true, there will be growing interest in and use of the term “Christianophobia” in the days to come.

Having read Ziegler Hemingway's post, USA Today's Grossman wrote a January 3 blog post exploring the question, "Does Egypt bomb blast signal rising 'Christianophobia?'"

In closing her January 3 post, Grossman posed these questions to her readers:

Is faith under fire -- Christian or Muslim -- worrying you? Do efforts such as the one by Oklahoma voters to ban Sharia law (currently stalled in the courts) have a parallel with restrictions on Christianity elsewhere?

Of course the Oklahoma ballot initiative doesn't prevent private dispute meditation based on Islamic principles, it just prohibits the consideration of sharia law principles by state judges. That's a far cry from restrictions in predominantly Muslim countries like Pakistan which make Christians second-class citizens if not outlaws by severely restricting public worship and evangelism and by turning a blind eye to violence or discrimination against Christian minorities.