Religion

On Holy Saturday, The Washington Post took an old Sally Quinn interview (posted 36 days earlier, on February 27) so they could rip Christians on Easter weekend for their allegedly persistent anti-Semitism. Not the Muslims – no, the Christians. The original headline was “Jesus Was a Jew — Get Over It: A Q&A with award-winning writer James Carroll on how Christians misunderstand Jesus.”…

Filling in for Bob Schieffer as moderator of Face the Nation, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell conducted two vastly different interviews regarding multiple religious freedom laws being debate across the nation, by treating Sarah Warbelow of the Human Rights Campaign to a softball interview but repeatedly pressing former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) over his support for such laws. 

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, an all liberal panel repeatedly took shots at the Republican Party over its support for religious freedom laws with Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report going so far as to suggest that on the issue on the issue of gay marriage “if we took everybody over the age of 50, and just moved them out of this country, this wouldn't be an issue at all.” 

UPDATE, April 6: An email sent by "Virginia Commonwealth University News" insists, despite the November 2014 tweet originally found at the link about Bryan's "GoFundMe" effort, that Alix Bryan "has not been employed by Virginia Commonwealth University." Accordingly, the text in this post's final sentence now refers to Bryan's claim in her WTVR bio and at her LinkedIn profile to have received a "…

On the front page of the New York Times sat "Religion Laws Quickly Fall Into Retreat," a label-heavy (14 "conservative" labels) 1,500-word story on Indiana's controversial religious freedom law. The Times' coverage has also been consistently slanted with both that labeling bias and scare quotes surrounding the term "religious freedom."

Media watchers in the past week rightly have criticized multiple media outlets for suddenly deciding that religious freedom needs quotation marks, as in “religious freedom.”  Leave it to the news pages of The Wall Street Journal, though, to use those quotation marks, which by their nature indicate that the very concept is in dispute, in the same story with the term gay rights published without…

Damon Root at the Hit & Run blog at Reason.com has an excellent post today taking the New York Times to task for its hypocrisy on the question of free-speech rights for corporations. 

Christianity’s tent is not big enough to accommodate both the supporters of Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act and Brittney Cooper, who in a Wednesday piece for Salon blasted both the state’s pre-fix RFRA and the religious right in general. “This kind of legislation is rooted in a politics that gives white people the authority to police and terrorize people of color, queer people and…

Here's some helpful advice for newsroom assignment editors and TV producers: put Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in your address book for the next time a controversy erupts regarding a state's religious-freedom protection laws. 

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo has aggressively attacked those who support Indiana's religious freedom law and on Thursday night he brought on Charles Barkley to slime Christians as "religious nuts." The former NBA player, who is from Alabama originally, sneered, "All these rednecks hide behind the Bible. That's what they do. That's one of the reason the south is behind in everything. They always hide…

Update, April 3: The Indiana man who claims to have been hacked now admits that he wasn't, but says he was "joking" about robbing Memories Pizza, and is threatening to sue those who exposed his (ahem) public comments.  Those of us following the Memories Pizza story won't have trouble remembering it as the years go by, thanks only partially to the Walkerton, Indiana store's fairly unusual name…

Facts don't matter when the media and gay activists believe they can find an issue that stirs controversy and advances their cause.

Two days ago I noted how Hardball host Chris Matthews slandered Catholic nuns in Indiana as bigots who want to deprive gay Americans of their rights. Tonight, the evening of Holy Thursday, Matthews was not as explicit or as strident in language, but he did hint that the nuns who appeared with Gov. Mike Pence at his signing ceremony for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act earlier this week were …

A short unbylined Associated Press report at its national site on the situation at Memories Pizza in Walkerton, Indiana this afternoon made sure to mention that the pizzeria "won't cater gay weddings" (in the headline). It also misstated the owner's statement to a South Bend TV station, claiming, using its own words, that she "said the state's new religious objections law backs their right to…