Christianity

The manufactured controversy over Chick-Fil-A won’t be dying down anytime soon, if media figures get their way.

Chick-Fil-A President Dan Cathy stated that he was “guilty as charged” when it came to supporting the traditional family, and commented on a radio show that “I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at him and say: You know, ‘We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’”

That’s tantamount to heresy in Hollywood and in New York and D.C. newsrooms. The media have proven themselves in the tank for same sex marriage, and Chick-Fil-A is learning what it means to cross them.

San Francisco media outlet SFist has adopted the language of the Westboro Baptist Church to bash Chick-fil-A, referencing the death of Chick-fil-A spokesman Donald Perry with the question “God Hates Flacks?”

A July 27 article about the death of Chick-fil-A PR Vice President Donald Perry was titled “God Hates Flacks? Chick-fil-A Spokesman Dies of Heart Attack.” The headline references the disgusting slogan of the Westboro Baptist Church – God Hates Fags.

MSNBC is your network for badly fractured Bible analogies. Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller revealed that on Friday morning, Roberts cracked up MSNBC weekend host Melissa Harris-Perry by telling anyone for "marriage equality" who eats at Chick-fil-A on August 1 -- when the conservatives turn out in support -- is a "chicken-eating Judas."

So in the Roberts analogy, Jesus is Barney Frank, and the critics of homosexuality are the ones who hand him over to be crucified? Roberts slammed former Gov. Mike Huckabee for backing the chicken chain:

Even as Democratic officials like Rahm Emanuel promise to use their government power to punish Chick-fil-A, Good Morning America's George Stephanopoulos and Ron Claiborne on Thursday derided the fast food chain's president for speaking out against gay marriage, chiding the "firestorm" and food fight" the company has created. [See video below. MP3 here.] In contrast, the same program in 2006 praised the "spirited" and "unbowed" Dixie Chicks for expressing their First Amendment rights by trashing then-President Bush. 

Co-anchor George Stephanopoulos insisted that CEO Dan Cathy's comments in support of traditional marriage have "sparked a firestorm across the Internet." Reporter Ron Claiborne mocked, "This food fight, George, is very rapidly turning into a full scale culture war." Claiborne listed Roseanne Barr, as just another celebrity, along with Ed Helms, who has spoken out against Chick-fil-A. He failed to mention Barr's deranged rants, including tweeting that "anyone who eats S--t Fil-A deserves to get the cancer."

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.”

In a pre-recorded interview which ran on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Tonight, CNN's Piers Morgan pressed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia from the left on abortion rights and Scalia's views on Roe versus Wade.

After earlier articulating the argument that a Supreme Court should perhaps be flexible as times change, Morgan again brought up the issue of "changing times" and seemed to lump abortion in with other rights that women acquired in the 20th century, as he asserted, "Everybody believed that was the right thing to do."

Media coverage of both the "Fortnight for Freedom" events sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the competing "Nuns on the Bus" campaign, reveal interesting results.

A total of 141 dioceses, involving tens of thousands of Catholics, participated in the USCCB events; it ended with a crowd of 5,000 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on July 4. Although Bill Moyers wrote that "a bus filled with nuns" participated in the "Nuns on the Bus" campaign, in actual fact a total of two nuns made the entire bus trip; there were never more than six at any one time on the bus. No matter, CNN did eight stories on the nuns, and none on the bishops; MSNBC did six on the nuns, and one on the bishops; and CBS News did two on the nuns and none on the bishops.

Now here’s a stretch: what began on the front page of Thursday’s Washington Post as a story on the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia asking volunteer religion teachers to sign a fidelity oath to church teachings concluded with an image of German Catholic bishops doing a Heil Hitler salute.

This loaded Nazi reference – in a church now led by someone conscripted into Hitler’s army – came from a Rev. Ronald Nuzzi at Notre Dame, a college which quite publicly displayed its lack of orthodoxy by honoring President HHS Mandate Obama in 2009:

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.” 

Liberal media outlets have never met a dissenting Catholic they didn’t like. The flavor of this month – a liberal nun and her publicity tour group for “social justice” – got the requisite puff piece in The Washington Post to complete the adoration heaped on them by CNN, Time, and MSNBC.

In her June 27 article “The Nuns on the Bus tour promotes social justice – and turns a blind eye to the Vatican,” the Post’s Michelle Boorstein fawned over activist nun Sister Simone Campbell and her “Nuns on the Bus” tour, which she calls “an attempt to motivate opposition to a House budget that would sharply reduce spending on social services” and a “response of sorts to a Vatican report in April raising alarm about ‘radical feminism’ among top American nuns.”

Has CNN's integrity sunk so low that it is now using works of fiction as sources to round out its own reports?

While covering the story of Fox News reporter Greg Burke moving to the Vatican's own communications team, CNN mentioned his membership in Opus Dei and referenced the organization's (quite negative) portrayal in the fictional book and movie The Da Vinci Code. [Video below the break. Audio here.]

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:

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:

Washington Post writers have a habit of twisting history into political parables in order to spin current events. The Catholic Church is the latest target of the Post’s efforts to rewrite history. 

“She the People” columnist Melinda Henneberger profiled the life of ex-nun, artist and activist Sister Corita Kent in a June 19 blog post titled: “Before there were nuns on a bus, there was Sister Corita Kent.” Henneberger, who gushed that “God was written all over Sister Corita Kent’s work, literally,” lamented that “Naturally, she wound up in Dutch with Rome.”   

So here's how it appears to me and I suspect many other news readers, never mind the real motivations. At the Associated Press, when you're covering situations like suicide bomber attacks on Christian churches in Nigeria yesterday, you hold out as long as you can in speculating about who is responsible, even though Islamist Boko Haram terrorists (and only Boko Haram terrorists) have claimed credit for previous attacks in that country, and even though no other religion on earth generates large numbers of people who claim to be its adherents who are willing to blow themselves up so they can kill as many infidels as possible.

Then, once the inevitable claim of responsibility arrives, you treat it as old news (the bombings were a whole 24-36 hours ago, y'know), focus your headline and coverage on "Christian" reprisals instead (even though there is no element of Christian doctrine which sanctions random reprisals), and identify who carried out the attacks as late as you possibly, so it will end up not making most broadcast and many print reports. Here are excerpts:

It would appear that the establishment press is determined to portray a "both sides are at fault" equivalency as much as possible in Nigeria where almost none exists.

Earlier today, Patrick Poole at the PJ Tatler pointed out that a brief initial Associated Press item from Lagos would cause a person, in Poole's words, to "come away mystified as to why these churches were subject to apparently random 'violence.'" He specifically objected to the vagueness of a sentence claiming that "Churches have been increasingly targeted by violence in Nigeria." Later more detailed dispatches from Reuters and the AP aren't much more helpful, especially as they both fail to tag the principal perpetrators of the violence, the Boko Haram, as the terrorists that they are.

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]

New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein, in Atlanta to cover the annual meeting of Roman Catholic bishops, "Bishops Defend Fight Against Obama's Policy on Birth Control Coverage," portrayed the church as on the defensive over its fight for religious freedom, as did the story's text box ("Acknowledging criticism, even from some Catholics"). It was embellished with a photo not of the bishops but a small group of protesters in support of liberal nuns censored by the Vatican.

At least Goodstein didn't put the phrase "religious liberty" in scare quotes, as she did with "religious freedom" in a February article hostile to the church's opposition to Obama requiring religious institutions to provide birth control.

"Christians On Right Urge Reform On Migrants," ran the headline over Trip Gabriel's Wednesday piece. If it sounds familiar, it's because the New York Times runs these wishful-thinking "conservative Christians break with movement on immigration enforcement" on a regular basis.

From a July 2010 article by Laurie Goodstein: "At a time when the prospects for immigration overhaul seem most dim, supporters have unleashed a secret weapon: a group of influential evangelical Christian leaders."

A day after asking if the Catholic church is waging a "war on women," CNN teed up liberal Sister Simone Campbell by asking if Rome is being "dictatorial" in its recent dealings with American nuns. After a group of U.S. nuns has been targeted by the Vatican for reform, CNN has shamelessly been promoting the nuns' side of the story with no guest to represent the church's side.

Starting Point anchor Soledad O'Brien mentioned her colleague's absurd  "war on women" question from the previous day and asked Sister Campbell if she agreed that "Rome is essentially remaining dictatorial, non-collaborative, but the American Catholic Church is not." [Video below the break. Audio here.]