Anti-Religious Bias

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday's Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in "bullying" in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing to trade being beat up in grade school for being "gently masturbated by a pop star."

Maher also again attacked Mormonism and religion generally, using uncensored vulgarity, and seemed to hold Romney responsible for the polygamy of his grandfather.

The Real Time host brought up Michael Jackson to suggest that Romney had behaved worse than a child molester:

CNN's Carol Costello wondered why the U.S. Catholic Bishops are investigating the Girl Scouts over possible ties to Planned Parenthood and the distribution of anti-Catholic material. "Not all of those Girl Scouts are Catholic," Costello mused on Tuesday. "So why impose Catholic beliefs on the Girl Scouts and threaten to pull out of the organization?"

Costello hosted the Catholic League's Bill Donohue, who argued that the Girl Scouts might be the one's "imposing" on others' beliefs. "I think it's going backwards. If, in fact, everything that the critics of the Girl Scouts are saying were true, then it's the Girl Scouts imposing on Catholics," he insisted. [Video coming soon.]

"I’ve never understood the opposition to gay marriage." That's the confession with which Sally Quinn -- the agnostic, liberal editor of the Washington Post's "On Faith" religion section-- began her May 11 column. But rather than humbly seek an understanding of the religious faith that informs the beliefs of millions of American Christians, Quinn launched into an attack on them by comparing them to opponents of the racial integration of the nation's public schools.

History, Quinn insists, is on the side of the eventual societal and legal acceptance of same-sex marriage, and those who stand in the way will one day be haunted by it, living their lives knowing how wretched they were to oppose progress in the first place:

The headline at the Associated Press's Sunday morning story primarily about GOP presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney's commencement address at Liberty University ("Romney urges grads to honor family commitments") was at least acceptable. It went downhill from there, betraying what appear to be deeply-held biases held by writers Kasie Hunt and Rachel Zoll against Republicans, conservatives, and Christians -- up to and including a "red meat" reference in what the Administration's Press will probably still claim is an objective report.

Apart from the self-evident bias, Hunt and Zoll failed to grasp the fundamental concept that a commencement speech is not a political stump speech. It is supposed to be a chance for the speaker, at least one who isn't a self-absorbed narcissist, to inform, inspire and advise graduates on what awaits them in the real world and how they should generally consider carrying out the rest of their lives. That, to the AP pair's apparent disappointment and astonishment, is what Romney did. Their opening six paragraphs plus a few selected others come after the jump, with prejudicial verbiage in bold, followed by several paragraphs from Romney's speech which Hunt and Zoll, if they they had been there to report a story instead of serving as Team Obama apparatchiks, would have noted:

MSNBC's Martin Bashir -- who attends a New York City church pastored by a conservative minister who signed the pro-traditional marriage Manhattan Declaration -- yesterday maligned the Holy Bible in an attempt to defend President Obama from the charge that his support of same-sex marriage contradicts biblical teaching on matrimony.

The incident came in an interview with Dr. Robert Jeffress after the Dallas-area Baptist minister affirmed that he "absolutely" agreed that defending same-sex marriage "contradicts" the teaching of Scripture. "I think the president is violating the very teaching and words of the Jesus he says he follows," Jeffress noted. That's when Bashir sprung his "have you stopped beating your wife, yet"-style gotcha question:

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Dan Savage is a bully. How ironic, since he heads the most high-profile anti-bullying campaign the United States. But for Savage, it only gets better if you support a rabidly liberal, “anything goes” lifestyle.

Savage recently garnered media attention for his offensive remarks about Christians, but in reality this is old news. The liberal media and Obama administration love to portray Dan Savage as the anti-bullying savior, but the real Dan Savage has been a repulsive and twisted creature for years. Just read any of his five books.

As NewsBusters reported last month, Comedy Central's Jon Stewart did a truly vile sketch a few weeks ago displaying a Nativity scene over a woman's vagina.

According to BuzzFeed, Delta Airlines has dropped its sponsorship of the Daily Show as a result [reader discretion advised: offensive graphic displayed below page break]:

HBO's Bill Maher took a lot of heat last week for calling Mormonism a cult that isn't a charity because it doesn't give to poor people.

Defending himself on Friday's Real Time, the host explained why he believes contributions to the Mormon Church and such things as the symphony and the ballet shouldn't be tax deductible but ignored that he supports federal funding of NPR (partial video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

Rick Reilly's wide world of sports, apparently, has little use for conservative evangelical Christians and their convictions. Last year he mocked a teenage Christian wrestler who defaulted rather than wrestle a girl. Now the ESPN columnist has set his sights on Nebraska assistant football coach Ron Brown, who has been politically active in local government debates about expanding anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation. [Related item: ESPN Columnist Agitates for Coach's Firing for Proclaiming His Religious Beliefs]

"Like to meet one of the doomed sinners who has Ron Brown so inflamed?" Reilly asked rhetorically before introducing readers to one Brett Major who "thanks to Ron Brown himself" became a Christian:

He's compared conservatives to radical Hindus and Islamists, called the Tea Party the "racist white bloc" of the GOP, and compared evangelicals to the Taliban, so naturally Huffington Post writer Frank Schaeffer was the perfect guest for Martin Bashir to bring on the May 2 edition of his eponymous program to discuss the importance of religious "faith as an issue" in the 2012 general election campaign.

Schaeffer toned down his rhetoric a tad bit from previous excursions on the "Lean Forward" network, but he still managed to work in grotesquely misleading and hateful slams of evangelicals and conservative Catholics.

The liberal media love the Catholic Church when it publicly makes pronouncements that tend to favor liberal Democratic priorities. Not so much when the Church seeks to guard its doctrine and discipline deviations from orthodoxy.

So it's no surprise that MSNBC's Chris Jansing touted Cardinal Timothy Dolan this morning for "taking aim at Republicans over immigration policy" only to turn around in the same interview and practically accuse the church of waging a war on nuns in the same interview.

A shareholder in New York Times stock told Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and other officials at the company's annual meeting last week, "You’re willing to offend the Catholics because they’re not going to come and kill you.”

Accuracy in Media's Cliff Kincaid reported Wednesday:

Under the stewardship of Andrew Rosenthal (infamous for accusing House Speaker John Boehner of racism for asking President Obama to delay a speech to Congress for a day) the New York Times's Sunday Review section is devolving into a hard-left opinion page.

Last week's Sunday Review fully fulfilled its lefty promise, aided by Times columnists Nicholas Kristof and Maureen Dowd, who chose the same topic: Brave liberal nuns versus and out of touch conservative Catholic hierarchy. Kristof's "We Are All Nuns" and Maureen Dowd's particularly overwrought "Bishops Play Church Queens as Pawns." Dowd was ably dissected by Tim Graham here at NewsBusters: "She thinks that by insisting the nuns and sisters follow the historic doctrines of the church, the church is 'losing its soul.' To insist on orthodoxy is putting the nuns through an Inquisition – with Dowd wanting the reader to imagine nuns in thumbscrews or on a rack."

In Saturday’s Washington Post, religion columnist Lisa Miller brought her usual radical feminism to the table insisting Mary be “heard” as the Vatican insisted that American nuns and sisters actually act like they belong to the Catholic Church.

But this line stood out: “For more than a thousand years, women like Mary have entered religious life hoping to find a safe place where they might receive an education and protection from the oppression of marriage and the dangers of child-bearing.” The oppression of marriage?

Bill Maher on Friday evening once again displayed a level of ignorance and intolerance that should completely disqualify him as a political commentator.

On HBO's Real Time, the vulgar anti-theist said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney doesn't give to charity. "All his charitable donations are to Mormons. He gives to his cult. That’s not a charity. They're not poor people" (video follows with transcript and commentary, serious vulgarity warning):

So, uh, have you heard that the Catholic Church is working up a "crackdown" on nuns? Of course you have, as time and again the media have been repeating the charge. Well, today Sally Quinn, the agnostic editor of the Washington Post's On Faith feature, joined in the fun with her April 24 screed about "A Catholic 'war on women.'"

From start to finish, Sister Sally poured forth bilious attacks on the Catholic Church. Here's how she opened her screed:

The New York Times' obsession with the Catholic Church reached a new level of hysteria on Friday when an editorial bemoaned that the Vatican is now criticizing American nuns who publicly contradict Church doctrine.

The Times' editorial prompts a number of questions: What concern is it to the Times how the Catholic Church conducts its business? Since when has the Times been worried about Catholic nuns in America?

Reuters reporter Andrew Stern grossly distorted the nature of a Vatican document released on Wednesday which raises theological concerns about American religious orders. Regarding the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), Stern wrote that the group said it was "stunned" that "the Vatican reprimanded it for spending too much time on poverty and social-justice concerns and not enough on condemning abortion and gay marriage." Yeah, and that's just the lead paragraph of his biased article, "Nuns group 'stunned' by Vatican slap," which I found on page A2 of today's Washington Post.

Stern described the Vatican document as a  "stinging report" that "reprimanded American nuns for expressing positions on political issues that differed, at times, from views held by U.S. bishops." But a review of the actual document shows no concern at all with partisan political matters, nor does the tone strike one as "stinging." Indeed, to this non-Catholic, it sounded rather pastoral and doctrinally-focused. Here's a link to the full item, with key excerpts below (emphasis mine):

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops speaking out with concern about the Paul Ryan/GOP budget plan is a "step in the right direction," according to liberal MSNBC host Alex Wagner.

Catholics "are not a monolithic voting bloc," MSNBC host Alex Wagner reminded her panel on her Friday Now program. "There are a lot of Catholics in the country, and I could name a few, who think that the Church, you know, has been far too vocal on issues that don't matter and not nearly vocal enough on those that do." Apparently to Wagner, the USCCB's pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, and anti-ObamaCare contraception mandate are those pesky, inconsequential policy matters that the bishops waste their time on.

Newsweek's Andrew Sullivan got a much-needed education about religion and politics from not one but two evangelical leaders Sunday.

The first came from Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention who in the midst of a heated debate on CBS's Face the Nation told Sullivan, "Any fusion between evangelicalism and Republicanism pales in comparison to the point of anemia compared to the black church and the Democratic Party" (video follows with transcript and commentary):