Five years ago, The Washington Post's Ceci Connolly did a front-page smear of Christian AIDS activist Jerry Thacker, who had been appointed to the presidential AIDS commission. The headline? "AIDS Panel Choice Wrote of a ‘Gay Plague.'"

Thacker, who is HIV-positive himself, had merely written on his Website that health authorities and journalists had used the term "gay plague" during the early 1980s. Amid a media firestorm, he withdrew his nomination the next day.

Fast forward to Connolly's lede in the August 7, A-2 story "Early Lessons Forgotten, AIDS Conference Told," on the International AIDS Conference's finding that HIV/AIDS is skyrocketing largely because of homosexual sex. Connolly describes AIDS in a similar way to how Thacker put it:

A telephone tipster made a very interesting point to us today about The Washington Post. In the midst of their coverage of the Anna Nicole Smith case, and a Vermont campaign-finance limit case, the Post found no room Wednesday for the pro-life win in NOW v. Scheidler. (That's the case where NOW tried to have clinic protesters charged under a mob-racketeering statute.) The Post could argue that the case is a bit of a rerun: the court dismissed it in 2003, only to have a federal judge keep the case alive like a zombie. But the court ruled 8 to 0 and the feminists were routed in the opinion by none other than liberal Clinton appointee Stephen Breyer. USA Today published a fairly prominent, thorough piece Wednesday on Page A-4.

Ken Shepherd noted that the front page of Monday's WashPost carried a story with the headline "Access to Abortion Pared at State Level." But I had a different take on reporter Ceci Connolly's piece. It begins: "This year's state legislative season draws to a close having produced a near-record number of laws imposing new restrictions on a woman's access to abortion or contraception." This language of danger to "women's access" sounds like abortion-advocate wording.

The question that emerges: is every pro-life measure a "restriction"? The third paragraph begins: "Three states have passed bills requiring that women seeking an abortion be warned that the fetus will feel pain, despite inconclusive scientific data on the question." Does an informed-consent rule really qualify as a restriction? The Post isn't going to call it what is really is: a restriction on an abortion clinic's ability to persuade women to buy what it's selling.

There's a lot of talk of parental notification and consent requirements in the story, which are restrictions, but then the question: is a 12-year-old girl a "woman"? (Ceci also cites the Alan Guttmacher Institute as a main source for the story, without noting it's an arm of Planned Parenthood.) She also includes in this "restrictions" story new bills recognizing the "fetus" as a human being under assault and murder laws, which again in no way "restrict" women's "access" to abortion.

Near the end of Ceci's story comes this passage: "Not all the restrictive measures came from Republican-controlled states. Democratic governors in Kansas and Pennsylvania signed budgets that steer millions of dollars to organizations that provide alternatives to abortion." Now how on Earth does that qualify as a "restriction" to women's "access"? It allows women to seek alternatives, if that's where they want to go. Once again, it is only a "restriction" on abortion clinic business, in that it might attract women away from an abortion. I don't think the Post would argue that funding anti-smoking programs is a "restriction" on smoking.

In Washington Post staff writer Ceci Connolly's below-the-fold piece, "Access to Abortion Pared at State Level," Ms. Connolly tagged abortion-regulating measures passed by state legislatures recently as "antiabortion measures" and the proponents of same as "antiabortion forces." Yet a search of Nexis by contrast reveals that efforts to regulate 2nd Amendment rights of American citizens are never tagged as "anti-gun" but rather as "gun control,"the term favored by liberals who advocate strictly regulating, if not banning, gun rights.

The day after her paper reported on a potential stem cell breakthrough which doesn't require destroying human embryos, the Washington Post's Ceci Connolly today wrote a piece focusing on liberal politicians and scientists receiving the news unenthusiastically, concerned that the promise of stem cell therapies that don't require the destruction of human embryos would undercut their pet research project, creating stem cells by destroying unborn human beings.