Sexuality

As early as tomorrow morning but most assuredly before the month is over, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defines, for federal purposes, marriage as an institution existing between a man and a woman. A ruling on that count would have repercussions to a whole host of federal employee benefits, so it's perfectly legitimate for the Washington Post to examine what happens in such a case.

But "Federal Diary" columnist Joe Davidson went much further than that in his June 19 piece, "DOMA ruling could expand rights for gays, but with questions about full spousal benefits." Davidson made crystal clear to the reader his personal feelings on the illegitimacy of DOMA, that he would celebrate its demise, and that the Supreme Court failing to vacate the law would be an injustice (emphasis mine):

In Tuesday's Washington Post, Tom Hundley of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting gave Post readers a textbook example in biased reporting freighted with loaded language. The target was a predictable bogeyman of secular liberal reporters: the Catholic Church.

Hundley painted the constitutional court battle over a "reproductive health law" in the Philippines as a struggle "pit[ting] the entrenched power of the Roman Catholic establishment against a rising tide of modernization and economic aspiration." You read that right. It's progress and prosperity against repression and Romanism according to Hundley.

Abby Bergman has an ax to grind. An LGBT activist “all her life,” according to her bio, the high school junior is also the daughter of a lesbian couple, and as a result … thinks we should chuck Father’s Day out the window. 

Bergman just wrote a Father’s Day piece (read, an anti-Father’s Day piece) for the Huffington Post called “Celebrating Father’s Day With Two Moms,” in which she whined that the traditional holiday was not quite inclusive enough. Although nothing stopped her from honoring “all the typical ‘father things’ that my moms do for me every day,” Bergman still managed to gripe. 

Here’s a headline that stood out in the Sunday Washington Post: “‘M’ or ‘F’? Outdated IDs don’t cover transgender individuals.” It even had the period, for emphasis. This was meant to be a news story on A-5, by AP reporter Lisa Leff, even though it read like a libertine-left pamphlet.

The “outdated” part is an ID that describes a man who “identifies as” female. AP’s Leff constructed a whole story of Transgender Equality lobbying, without a whisper of someone who disapproves, as she tweeted it, that “Transgender activists are racking up wins on one of their biggest issues.”

On June 11, Slate editor Emily Bazelon whipped out the Nazi card against Congressman Trent Franks.  The media site, which is an affiliate of the Washington Post, unsurprisingly went after the Republican legislator for his remarks about rape on Wednesday concerning a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks into a pregnancy.

Of course, liberals tried to tie these remarks to Todd Akin, who made scientifically inaccurate statements about sexual assault and pregnancy last year. Yet, even some notables on the left are saying Franks is no Akin.

Uncle Jesse isn’t quite so family-friendly as he used to be. John Stamos, who played “Uncle Jesse” in the family-oriented hit TV show “Full House,” is set to host a new show in which he prompts friends and celebrities to open up about their first sexual experience. 

Entitled “Losing Your Virginity,” the new show is launching as a Yahoo! webseries in which Stamos interviews mostly-celebrity guests to reveal the details about their “first time.” Stamos is interested in whether his guest’s experiences were “a loss of innocence,” or humorous, or … (wait for it) … “love.” Although he insists it will not be graphic, he also suggested the show will re-create the guest’s loss-of-virginity experiences “with puppets or dolls or something – animated possibly.”

Former DNC Communications Director and NARAL Pro-Choice America board member Karen Finney recently received her own weekend show on MSNBC and it appears that her radical views on abortion will be a regular theme across the “Lean Forward” network.

Appearing as a guest on Now w/ Alex Wagner on June 13, Finney claimed that Rep. Trent Franks’ (R-Ariz.) efforts to ban abortions based on race demonstrate that “the guy is whacked out anyway.” [See video after jump. MP3 audio here.]

Apparently ABC's news division is not content with reporting the news and spinning it to promote a liberal agenda. It now devotes a whole program to manufacturing fake scenarios in the hopes of pushing a liberal agenda.

Take the program, “What Would You Do?,” (WWYD) which began years ago as an occasional segment on the Primetime newsmagazine program and used actors in hidden camera situations to see how bystanders would react.  Just in time for Gay Pride month, for the June 7 edition, WWYD set up a fake situation involving a basketball player  coming out to his teammates and coach. Of course, the team and the coach were all actors playing out a skit whereby they bashed their now out-of-the-closet teammate before unsuspecting spectators.

Liberals’ obsession with the worn-out GOP “war on women” meme entered a new phase on June 13 following comments made by Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.). During a committee hearing in which the congressman introduced legislation that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, Mr. Franks claimed that:

Before, when my friends on the left side of the aisle here tried to make rape and incest the subject – because, you know, the incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low.

Having a strict “girls’ room” and “boys’ room” is just as bad as keeping black and white bathrooms separate, claimed UCLA law professor Adam Winkler. In a New Republic article called “Bathrooms Are Not Separate-But-Equal,” Winkler sympathized with Maine high school student Nicole Maines, a 15-year-old “transgender girl” who was denied access to the girls’ restroom, since Maines is biologically a boy who wears female clothing and makeup.

Winkler decried the “intolerance” of the “insensitive” schools officials who aren’t comfortable letting the male Maines use the girls’ bathroom, and complained that these are “strict and outdated rules that discriminate in who can use which restroom.” He insisted that such standards are “acts of discrimination no different from those that prohibited black people from entering white bathrooms until the 1960s.”

Yesterday evening the Obama administration announced it would back down from plans to fight a federal judge's ruling that the Plan B emergency contraception pill must be made available over-the-counter and without age restriction in U.S. pharmacies. Previously the FDA permitted over-the-counter sales to girls and women aged 17 and older and the Obama administration wished to revise that age requirement down to 15.

But in reporting the story, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal omitted any objection from pro-life or parents rights groups, even as they reported the reactions of abortion rights advocates. "We are pleased that women should soon be able to buy Plan B One-Step without the arbitrary restrictions that kept it locked behind the pharmacy counter when they needed it most urgently," the Journal's Jennifer Corbett Dooren quoted Nancy Northup of the Center for Reproductive Rights at the close of her 11-paragraph, page A3 story for Tuesday's print edition.

Russell Brand is living up to his raunchy reputation of cracking sex jokes about conservatives.  The crass British comedian today announced that he thinks conservative republicans with traditional views on sexuality are “perverts.”

Interviewing with HuffPo Live’s Josh Zepps, Brand said that he doesn’t know anyone who isn’t interested in sexuality. When host Zepps replied that he knew “a few Republican Conservatives who’d say that,” Brand immediately added: “I’ll bet they’re perverts.”

Everyone remembers the extensive front-page coverage The Washington Post devoted to the jury selection and subsequent murder trial of infamous abortionist Kermit Gosnell right? Oh wait, that never happened, but another “local crime story” that occurred well outside the Post's home delivery area seems to be getting much better coverage than the Gosnell trial.

The Tuesday June 11 edition of The Washington Post ran a story on the front page of its Style section highlighting the first day of jury selection in the murder trial of George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. In total, the Post devoted 30-paragraphs to jury selection, yet among major newspapers, when it came to the murder trial of Kermit Gosnell, only The New York Times bothered to cover that portion of the trial.

In Tuesday night's episode of ABC's Nightline, host Cynthia McFadden introduced a story about a "normal" community of polygamist families that live in Centennial Park, Arizona. She also went on to plug for the new National Geographic show Polygamy, USA: 

To some, having more than one wife might sound like heaven on earth. But just imagine the communication skills required the potential for jealousy. And all those family logistics well they might just seem overwhelming. No one knows exactly how many polygamous live in this country. Most live in secret. There's been a lot of news about the followers of Warren Jeffs and alleged forced marriages of underage girls. But tonight we meet a community with a twist the women choose their husbands, not the other way around.

Having marriage issues? It might be due to your unnatural monogamy, according to Yahoo – or rather, a woman who previously studied men’s relationships with love dolls and edible sex toys.

Yahoo featured “The 5 Compelling Reasons Why Marriage Wasn’t Meant to Be Monogamous” on its front page, although the article originally appeared on a pregnancy, parenting and lifestyle site – Disney’s Babble.com. 

In early 2012, after the breast cancer charity Komen for the Cure announced it would end its relationship with Planned Parenthood, the group quickly saw a 100 percent spike in fundraising. But alas, defenders of the nation's largest abortion provider and their accomplices in the liberal media, chief among them MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, struck back with a vengeance and the group eventually reversed itself under intense pressure from the Left. Ever since the epic Komen cave, however, the organization has seen faltering fundraising.

"Komen can't outrun Planned Parenthood controversy as race enrollment drops," the New York Daily News reported last September. Fast forward to today as the Lena Sun reported in the June 5 Washington Post that Komen is dropping "its signature 3-Day walk in Washington and six other cities next year, slashing the number of the fundraising events by half, as participation continues to drop more than a year after a funding controversy involving Planned Parenthood." By contrast, however:

Looks like Mike Barnicle's not going to let anyone get to his PC-left when it comes to women.

On today's Morning Joe, Barnicle claimed that "a lot of men . . . fear the fact—and I think it's a fact—that women are better balanced than men.  They have better judgment about things than a lot of men."  Barnicle's comment during a discussion about the statement made yesterday by Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant that the decline in educational outcomes for children today is due to the entry of women into the workforce.  View the video after the jump.

“Just do it” before you say I do, HuffPo Live suggested when interviewing Jessica Ciencin Henriquez last week. Bashing programs that promote abstinence until marriage, author Henriquez attempted to blame her bad marriage on the fact that she stayed a virgin until the wedding.

HuffPo Live host Marc Lamont Hill was all support for Henriquez’ blame-game: “As the saying goes, you wouldn’t buy a car without giving it a test drive, would you?” Under the headline: “No Sex Before Marriage A Bad Idea, Says Author,” HuffPo devoted a half-hour segment to counting down reasons to give up purity before marriage.

Chalk this one up to the absurd. CNN's Ashleigh Banfield on Wednesday tried to draw a legal parallel between a Sharia Law execution and a Catholic school firing a teacher for violating her contract by disobeying church teaching on pregnancy. Banfield argued both violated the teacher's Constitutional rights.

"Well if it's an Islamic school and they decide to go with Sharia Law and they decide to stone me for this, they can't do that either," Banfield ridiculously argued. "Then don't sign up to be the teacher," responded prosecutor Christine Grillo, who multiple times reiterated that the teacher had violated her contract.

David Koenig's Wednesday coverage at the Associated Press of Exxon Mobil's annual meeting contained a predictable headline and related content telling us that the company wouldn't "explicitly ban discrimination against gays because the company already banned discrimination of any type and didn't need to add language regarding gays." Koenig's report apparently couldn't be considered complete without a contribution of misleading climate statistics and statements from the wire service's Seth Borenstein.

Borenstein's apparent input consisted of the following four paragraphs (bolds and numbered tags are mine):

UPDATE: The photo has been changed to a University of Hawaii logo.

For outrageous and tasteless photo placement, it's hard to top the one accompanying an article in the Modesto Press about top college football prospect Aaron Zwahlen.

Despite the availability of many photos of the player, at least a few of which are likely public domain, the Press chose to use the following photo accompanying a report that Zwahlen is choosing to do two years of missionary work with his church before he begins his collegiate career at the University of Hawaii (HT to a NewsBusters tipster):

MSNBC’s openly gay daytime host Thomas Roberts has almost daily segments promoting the network’s pro-gay agenda. Over the past several months, one of Roberts’ pet projects has been opposing a long-standing policy by the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) prohibiting openly gay individuals from being members of or leaders in the organizations.

On May 23, the BSA voted to allow openly gay individuals to join troops as of next year, but gay adults would still not be allowed to lead a troop. As a result, on Thursday May 24, Roberts opened his 11:00 a.m. show with the on-screen graphic “Far Enough?” to express his displeasure with the BSA’s decision. Rather than leave it posed as a question, Roberts made pretty clear his view that indeed it didn't go "far enough."

As my colleagues at NewsBusters have documented, the liberal media have already jumped on the bandwagon to defend an 18-year old Florida woman with unlawful sexual conduct with a 14-year old girl, saying authorities are only pressing charges because she's a lesbian. On Wednesday evening, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes joined the media frenzy by declaring this case an example of “LBGT Injustice.” 

On the May 22 edition of "All In," Hayes featured 18-year old Kaitlyn Hunt, her mother Kelly Hunt-Smith and their attorney Julia Graves to hype what Hayes remarked was an “incredible story.” With the on-screen graphic titling the segment, “LGBT Injustice.”