Anti-Religious Bias

The Boston Herald has reported that Mayor Tom Menino is threatening to make obtaining the necessary licenses for a family business to operate "very difficult" -- not because the business's products are controversial or hazardous, but because the privately-held company believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman.

The middle three paragraphs of an unbylined Associated Press report predictably watered down Menino's threatening posture against the Chick-fil-A fast-food chain to an issue of "discrimination" and made it appear as if there is some kind of rift between the president and the company (bolds are mine throughout this post):

The media crusade against Christian company Chick-fil-A for upholding Christian values and support companies favoring traditional marriage has reached new depths of insanity. In a satire piece blasting Chick-fil-A, Huffington Post contributor Domenick Scudera used his biblical ignorance to bash the Christian restaurant.

Scudera lambasted the Christian firm in a July 19 article snidely titled “Did Jesus Eat Chick-fil-A at the Last Supper?” His beef with Chick-fil-A: that the owner, Dan Cathy, stated that his “restaurant is based on biblical principles.”

The title of a post at Business Insider crows, “Here's The Ballsy Businessweek Cover That's Going To Piss Off The Mormon Church.” In truth, it should anger anyone who finds it low and, frankly, un-American, to attack a candidate – directly or indirectly – through his religion.

But with Mitt Romney running neck and neck with Barack Obama, Bloomberg Businessweek saw the opportunity to further the Obama campaign’s jihad against Romney the super-wealthy tax-avoiding capitalist, while reminding readers that Romney belongs to this sort of strange, secretive cult that’s also a business empire of questionable legitimacy.

On CNN's sister network HLN, when you don’t know how to answer an interview question, bash the Catholic Church - you’ll have your anti-Catholic bigotry promoted by CNN. In an interview with HLN’s Dr. Drew featured on CNN.com, stripper Joslyn Jones claimed that “most stuff that goes on at church” is “dirtier than what goes on in strip clubs.”

When challenged by Dr. Drew about the drug use and trauma history common among strippers, Jones deflected the question, bizarrely arguing: “It’s definitely very common, but it’s actually like, um, like I always try to use the analogy. You know, you look at the Catholic Church. How much nonsense and debauchery, and disrespect, and really underground, you know, seedy stuff goes on, that’s, the Catholic Church, you’re supposed to go to Church and everybody’s like oh I go to Church and I’m all prim and proper, sweet – it’s not really like that. Most stuff that goes on at church is dirtier than what goes on in strip clubs.” 

It appears as though MSNBC's Martin Bashir is bent on painting Republicans as anti-Mormom bigots who are terrified of their own presumptive presidential nominee's faith.  In a completely ridiculous and extreme statement on his program Tuesday, Bashir claimed that, “he [Mitt Romney] won't talk about his Mormonism because many Republicans see that religion as a cult.”

While there certainly are some folks who happen to be Republicans who believe this,  Bashir wants his gullible audience to believe this sentiment is widespread among the GOP.  Apparently Bashir doesn’t know that anti-Mormonism is more common among Democrats not Republicans.

When it's Sunday on National Public Radio, it must be time to announce the Catholic Church is out of step with  modern times. On Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR granted a soft-soap eight-minute interview to New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, the front-runner to succeed Michael Bloomberg as Mayor. NPR touted: "Christine Quinn has a notable biography. She's from an Irish family, she's Catholic and gay."

She's so "Catholic" that her "wedding" to Kim Catullo last year featured her walking down the aisle with her father to Beyonce's "Ave Maria," which is just another love song, not the actual Hail Mary hymn in any way. Her partner marched down the aisle with her dad, too...to Bruce Springsteen. NPR anchor David Greene asked as one of the "most powerful gay women" in America, if she shouldn't just leave the church that won't accept her homosexuality:

It's taken over four years for film director Paul Verhoeven to get anyone to turn his 2008 book "Jesus of Nazareth" into a movie, but numerous sources last week say he's finally done it.

Deadline reported last Tuesday that Muse Productions will produce the film claiming Jesus Christ was the product of Mary being raped by a Roman soldier:

Time magazine is shooting straight at Mitt Romney’s religion. On the Time Ideas blog, the conservative-bashing psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Frank has an article titled “The Root of Mitt Romney’s Comfort With Lying.” That root, he says,  is Mormonism.

Dr. Frank is agitated that Romney would “lie” about Obama’s economic record: "But this pattern of lying and not acknowledging it, even when confronted directly, has persisted and led me to look for other sources of Romney’s behavior and of his clear comfort with continuing it. I think much of this comfort stems from his Mormon faith."

Yesterday the Southern Baptist Convention elected their first black president, an historic moment for an organization that got its start defending slavery in pre-Civil War America.

CNN Starting Point host Soledad O'Brien interviewed Fred Luter Jr., who will be installed as president Wednesday evening. The interview on the main was fine, but towards the end, contributor Margaret Hoover pressed Luter as to whether he would champion as a "civil rights" cause, "inclusiveness of gay Americans," referring it seems to same-sex marriage. Luter answered in the negative, citing the Bible's teachings on the definition of marriage. It's then that O'Brien retorted that his stance put him in opposition to President Obama, as if to suggest that were a scandalous position for him to be in:

The conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition is in the middle of a three-day "conference and strategy briefing" in Washington, D.C., which proved to be a sufficient justification for MSNBC's Martin Bashir to bring back anti-conservative-Christian hatemonger Frank Schaeffer to denounce the meeting as essentially a congress of an American Christian Taliban.

"I think what you have to understand when you look at the religious right in action these days is that they speak in Orwellian doublespeak. They say the opposite of what they mean. They talk about faith and freedom, the conference should really be called Politics and Bondage," Schaeffer, the prodigal son of the late famous evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer snarled. [MP3 audio here; video is posted after the page break]

Via Breitbart, we learn that the Independent Film Channel (IFC) has a new sitcom in the works they’re touting/warning is the "most violent sitcom ever made." It’s called Bullet In The Face. Then comes the politics.

In addition to the “unrestrained shootings, peppered with wildly offensive language, IFC is apparently concerned that the use of a crucifix as a backscratcher and dialogue grouping Dick Cheney in with the likes of Hitler and Stalin will be misconstrued as something more than an attempt at some very dark, inappropriate humor." This kind of story is usually more of an advertisement than a warning.

Donald Trump on Monday had some harsh words for Bill Maher's incessant attacks on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's Mormonism.

Appearing on Fox News's On the Record, the real estate mogul said, "If a conservative Republican made a like statement about somebody else's religion, there’d be hell to pay. It’ll be all over the place. It would be the end of that person's career as you know it" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

National "Public" Radio has barely touched on the 43 Catholic organizations that filed lawsuits against the Obama administration, but it continues to be a noisy sounding board for leftist nuns and their supporters. On Friday, NPR offered more than 14 minutes of air time to the left-wing forces.

On the afternoon talk show Tell Me More, NPR devoted nine minutes and 47 seconds to a segment they titled "Born to Be Wild: Catholic Nuns Hit the Road." These "wild" nuns were celebrated for opposing the Paul Ryan budget with a bus tour. Once again, NPR's honored guest was Sister Simone Campbell of Network, the "social justice lobby." Martin asked Sister to get out a club (or a ruler?) and whack Ryan:

You don’t have to be Catholic to find the liberal media often sounds intentionally clueless when it writes about the Catholic Church publicly identifying for people both inside and outside the church what its teaching is.

When the church makes an announcement that perhaps someone who supports abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation isn’t really anywhere on the planet of Catholicism, liberal journalists have a fit. In Saturday’s Washington Post, (anti-)religion columnist Lisa Miller was so exercised she found someone to say the Vatican sees wayward nuns as comparable to Islamic terrorists (sort of like the Rosie O’Donnell character in An American Carol):

American liberals continue to be clueless (willfully or otherwise) as to the nature and purpose of the Catholic Church and its relationship to its members. The latest proof comes in the case of theVatican’s condemnation of left-wing nun Margaret Farley’s book, “Just Love, A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics,” which advocates gay sex and marriage, divorce, and female masturbation. These practices are contrary to Catholic theology as practiced since the beginning of Catholicism. 

But the Church’s reaction to the book is, to liberals, another example of the Vatican stifling women. Here’s how one Sarah O’Leary described it in the Huffington Post: “Sister Margaret A. Farley, a scholarly woman of faith who taught Christian Ethics at Yale University and served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, is being brought to the woodshed by Rome for penning "Just Love.” How dare she use her God given gifts of cognition to share her educated point of view with the world!” 

Sister Margaret Farley probably would have had Sally Quinn's respect when she endorsed same-sex marriage in her 2006 book Just Love, which has recently been denounced by the Vatican as unsuitable for use in Catholic theological or moral instruction due to its various departures from Church teaching.

But by golly, it's the Church's rebuke of Farley's defense of masturbation that Quinn thinks is her ticket to convincing her audience that the Church has lost its mind. From her June 7 On Faith blog post "Fifty Shades of Catholicism" (emphases mine):

Last month 43 Catholic institutions across America joined together to defend the First Amendment and filed a total of twelve lawsuits against the Administration in order to protect the right to freedom of religion on behalf of all Americans. 

This is the most significant religious lawsuit in U.S. history and Christian leaders all across America have joined in support of the Catholic institutions.  This lawsuit is not a single action by a few “out of touch religious leaders,” as the liberal national media would like to portray it. 

The Catholic News Agency's Michelle Bauman reports that there has been a "wave" of recent defections and departures from the Democratic Party that could be as many as several hundred. The establishment press is clearly being remiss in failing to note them at all -- something which would not be occurring if it involved Republicans going to the party of the left.

The reasons for the moves primarily relate to President Obama's endorsement of same-sex "marriage" and the assault on religious freedoms inherent in his administration's requirement that employers who offer health insurance plans, in Bauman's words, "cover contraception, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs, even if doing so violates their consciences." Excerpts from her report follow the jump, including a notable quote from Artur Davis, the former four-term Democratic congressman who announced to very little press coverage in late May that if he runs again for public office, it will be as a Republican:

When the news pertains to issues in the Catholic church, CNN loves to promote liberal theologians and religious, especially ones that are defying Catholic teaching. In contrast, orthodox priests and bishops might receive vastly different treatment – if they even get on CNN, that is.

So when an American nun's book on sexual ethics was found by the Vatican to be "not in conformity" with the Catholic Church's teaching, CNN contributor Stephen Prothero smacked the Vatican for its "unjust" condemnation of the book and accused the Catholic Church of continuing to "attack the sort of apple pie, mom kind of institutions in America."