Sexuality

Newly-declared 2016 presidential candidate Rand Paul took a shot at the media during a Wednesday campaign appearance in Milford, New Hampshire. An unidentified reporter asked the Kentucky senator about a recent interview he did with the Associated Press that centered on the controversial issue of abortion. Paul replied, "Why don't we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a 7-pound baby in the uterus?"

New Republic staff writer Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig has clearly run out of defenses for the conduct of those involved in the disgraceful, scandalous journalistic malpractice which gave rise to the now-retracted and thoroughly discredited "A Rape on Campus: The Struggle for Justice at UVA" at Rolling Stone. So here's her last refuge: Conservatism deserves some of the blame, because Sabrina Rubin…

Earlier this evening, the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism issued its report on Rolling Stone Magazine's November "A Rape on Campus" story. The report follows up on the magazine's request of Columbia to conduct an independent review of how the disastrously false 9,000-word story made it through to publication. USA Today is reporting that for all the harsh criticism the piece's…

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 "…

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…

The Washington Post apparently knows when it’s appropriate to completely omit a majority viewpoint from a news story: when an Obama-appointed  U.S. district judge in California orders “sex reassignment surgery” for a murderer because denying an expensive surgery on the taxpayer dime is a denial of “her” constitutional rights. Lindsey Beyer reported that Jeffrey Norsworthy, who now identifies as…

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…

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…

CNN's Gary Tuchman condescended towards Christian florists in rural Georgia on Wednesday's Anderson Cooper 360 over their religious-based stance against participating in homosexual "commitment ceremonies," as the state hasn't legalized same-sex "marriage" yet. Tuchman used the Bible as a club against two female employees: "The Bible talks an awful lot about love and loving your fellow man....You'…

Appearing on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night, Nina Burleigh of Newsweek crudely joked that Republicans who defended Pence and Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act were experiencing “premature intolerance ejaculation.” 

Following five straight days where the network evening newscasts slammed Indiana for passing its Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), Arkansas joined the barrage of criticism on Wednesday after Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson requested the legislature make changes to its own version. The CBS Evening News failed to mention how a small Indiana pizza parlor has been forced to at least…

Something hasn't seemed right about the Memories Pizza story from the get-go. Now I know why. In a Tuesday report, TV Station ABC 57 cited the Walkerton, Indiana business's Crystal O'Connor as saying that, in the station's words, they "don't agree with gay marriages and wouldn't cater them if asked to." In other words, they've never been asked to. The non-story which ignited a national firestorm…