On Friday, Curtis Houck at NewsBusters reported that "the Harrisburg, PA newspaper The Patriot News announced that both they and their online site PennLive.com 'will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.'"
As of three years ago, the newspaper claimed weekly circulation of 476,000. Its current hype to advertisers boasts of "500,000 unique visitors and 22 million page views each month." Faced with what quickly and obviously became a move with the potential to cause significant losses in readership, the paper abruptly reversed course Saturday morning.
Of course, it wasn't the clean "We were wrong, we are sorry" the circumstances demanded. Instead, the "apology" from John L. Micek, who is the outfit's editorial and opinions editor, rubbed the Supreme Court's same-sex "marriage" ruling in readers' faces and played the victim card.
Micek opened with a three-paragraph description of how one newsroom "colleague" cried tears of joy over the ruling. Fine, John, as if we didn't know that the press has almost universally and openly advocated for the cause for several decades.
Micek then went into "woe is me" mode (bolds are mine):
Our letters policy on same-sex marriage - an explanation and an apology: John L. Micek
... And as the comments on our main story about the ruling -- many of them openly hostile -- began to pile up, I decided I wanted to send the strongest possible message that the Opinion pages of PennLive and The Patriot-News would be space for civil discussion of one of the most important civil rights rulings of our lifetime.
I came up with three sentences, which currently read like this:
"As a result of Friday's ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will very strictly limit op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same-sex marriage.
"These unions are now the law of the land. And we will not publish such letters and op-Eds any more than we would publish those that are racist, sexist or anti-Semitic.
"We will, however, for a limited time, accept letters and op-Eds on the high court's decision and its legal merits."
... By day's end, I'd received dozens of emails and several phone calls -- not to mention the hundreds of comments appended to the editorial -- accusing me (and this news organization) of being "fascists" opposed to both the First Amendment and the right to freedom of expression.
And those were just the polite ones.
Micek then tried to make three points, all of which dug his hole deeper.
... First: No one at PennLive and The Patriot-News is an opponent of the First Amendment.
This argument seems potentially plausible until one nears the end of Micek's missive, where he states that "These pages, I remind myself finally, belong to the people of Central Pennsylvania." Well, my friend, if that's what you and your organization really believe, then "these pages" are in the public square, and (based on your representation) are fair game for First Amendment suppression charges if comment moderators censor comments whose only "offense" is disagreement with "the law" or not being within someone's intentionally limiting definition of mainstream.
... Second: And I cannot stress this one enough -- that's in a civil way. More than once yesterday I was referred to as "f****t-lover," among other slurs. And that's the point that I was trying to make with our statement: We will not publish such slurs any more than we would publish racist, sexist or anti-Semitic speech.
Immature name-calling is out of bounds, of course. But let's be clear, John: Your incivility, i.e., telling readers that you would henceforth limit what they can say in the public square (as defined by you) was the equivalent of rudely screaming "Shut up!" to hundreds of thousands of people.
People the paper and PennLive.com told to zip it included clerics of dozens of Christian and other faiths; devout followers of those religions, which based on natural law have taught and always will always teach that the behavior the Supreme Court legalized several years ago is morally wrong; non-religious people whose humanitarian instincts tell them that legitimate marriage as an institution is a one-man, one-woman undertaking; and people of goodwill in general who understand that history has been notoriously unkind to "anything goes" societies.
... Third: I fully recognize that there are people of good conscience and of goodwill who will disagree with Friday's high court ruling. They include philosophers and men and women of the cloth whose objections come from deeply held religious and moral convictions that are protected by the very same First Amendment that allowed me to stick my foot in my mouth on Friday.
Micek's contention is not credible. He certainly had to recognize that his revised comment policy would have prevented the posting of, among many others, a Catholic bishop's comment reiterating church doctrine, namely that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered" and that same-sex "marriage" defiles a sacred, time-tested foundational institution of civilization.
Finally:
I stand with my gay and lesbian friends who, on Friday, were extended the same protections under the law that the rest of us take for granted.
But for those of you who were offended by what was intended as a very genuine attempt at fostering a civil discussion, I apologize.
The second-last sentence seems gratuitous and unnecessary, until you realize that his organization must stay in the gay thought police's good graces, or they'll be in a heap of trouble.
As to Micek's final sentence, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air pegged it perfectly:
Ah yes, the standard “sorry if you were offended by my brilliance” non-apology. How exactly is telling people to shut up “fostering a civil discussion”? How does offering a blanket smear of all critics of Obergefell as bigots qualify as “a very genuine attempt” at any kind of discussion? For that matter, how did Micek envision a “discussion” coming from his all-out ban on any opposing view in his newspaper? At the end of all this, Micek then offers an apology — not for his actions, not for all of his mean-spirited and sanctimonious posing, but because we turned out to be not quite as stupid as Micek believed we were.
Let's also not rule out the idea that Micek had opportunistically embarked on a "testing the limits" exercise. In other words, he may have shut down discussion hoping that the euphoria in the homosexual community and the desire among many readers who want to "live and let live" — part of which involves not seeing icky people challenging their comfortable, oblivious worldview — might outweigh those who objected. That clearly didn't happen.
Regardless of the motivation, if Micek's gambit had worked, it could have spread to other papers like wildfire. It didn't work, but there's always next time — and given the censorious path this nation is traveling, next time probably isn't very far off.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
