Culture/Society

Time was, burning an American flag was a reliable way of getting on network TV, there to shock the taxpayers over their TV dinners. But these days, the network news programs don’t seem interested in American flag desecration, unless it happens in the Middle East. In the last five years, there have been only two mentions of domestic flag desecration on ABC, CBS and NBC. Both of those were on ABC.

Demography may not always be destiny, but according to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, the “best bet” is that over the next decade-plus, the Republican party as a whole will move towards the center-right as young, relatively moderate voters join and elderly right-wingers shuffle off this mortal coil. In a Monday article, Bouie predicted that “eventually, the GOP will find a working national majority,…

CNN's Chris Cuomo asserted that Jeb Bush "doesn't seem to be the new Republican" on Monday's New Day, after the former Florida governor voiced his support of traditional marriage during a recent interview on CBN. Cuomo later underlined that Bush is "going to have to figure out how to please the plurality" on the marriage issue, and added that "this is not a well-calculated move on that front."

Sofia Vergara is the Spanish-accented sexpot center of attention on the ABC sitcom Modern Family. She’s also now the center of an unwanted controversy over a “modern family.” She’s fighting with an ex-fiance over two frozen embryos. Back in 2013, Vergara granted a TV interview to Dr. Oz to discuss her baby-making plans: “I’ve been very concerned about fertility and I wanted to take advantage of…

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell joined Sean Hannity on his eponymous Fox News Channel (FNC) program Thursday evening and ripped ABC for deciding to air a sitcom this fall that’s loosely based on the life of anti-religious bigot Dan Savage. The segment began with Hannity providing a brief synopsis of the upcoming show (titled The O’Neals) and highlighting how “several high-profile…

A new Pew Research study found that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian fell from 78.4 to 70.6. In a Tuesday post, Martin Longman speculated about causes for the dropoff, commenting that “the Republican Party’s embrace of a very conservative interpretation of Christianity” may be “undermining people’s faith.” Longman added that it’s not solely the…

The Daily Beast's Dean Obeidallah denied the existence of Islamism as an ideology during a segment on Monday's CNN Newsroom. Obeidallah, responding to conservative commentator Erick Erickson applauding Saturday Night Live's draw Mohammed skit as "a perfectly humorous way to point out the absurdity of radical Islam's refusal to let people draw Mohammed," wildly claimed that "the [SNL] writers'...…

Edmund Burke wrote that “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” To American Prospect blogger Paul Waldman, “change” for conservatives means living to fight another day by conceding battle after battle to liberals. “Much of the history of the United States,” wrote Waldman in a Friday post, “is a slow but inexorable movement in a progressive direction,…

One of many LGBT darlings in the “mainstream” media is Alison Bechdel, the Maddowesque lesbian cartoonist who invented the “Bechdel test” in her comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" in 1985 – that a movie “must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.” Her autobiographical musical Fun Home is playing in New York, and Judith Thurman at The…

The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column. In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more…

On Thursday, NBC's Hoda Kotb and CNN's Alisyn Camerota both hounded Nick Loeb, actress Sofia Vergara's ex-fiancé, for his lawsuit to gain custody of the two embryos he created with Vegara. Kotb played up that they "signed an agreement saying neither of you would bring this embryo to term without the other's consent. I mean, it sort of seems like a dead issue at this point. Is it?" Camerota…

Taylor Wofford spotlighted how Pope Francis "publicly affirmed his stance on so-called traditional marriage between men and women" in a Wednesday item for Newsweek. Wofford did his best to indicate that the pontiff was commenting about the recent oral arguments on same-sex "marriage" at the Supreme Court: "Though he made no specific mention of the case before the court during his daily general…

For the second time in five weeks, People magazine put Bruce Jenner on the cover, and since announcing “I am a woman” on national television -- a "bombshell interview" -- the cover said he’s “Living as a woman every day – and feeling ‘elated’.” Inside, People gushed about Jenner’s “long journey to self-acceptance.” A photo caption recalled how Jenner told Diane Sawyer “Maybe this is my cause in…