Terry Mattingly at the media-analysis site GetReligion wonders why no one outside the religious or conservative media discovered this story at Baptistnews.com: “Chik-fil-A [sic] challenged for sponsoring LGBT-themed film festival.” It began:
Three years after evangelical Christians designated a day to eat more chicken in support of Chik-fil-A’s defense of traditional marriage, the Southern Baptist-owned fast food chain is taking heat online for sponsoring what is billed as the world’s first faith-based LGBT film festival.
A change.org petition posted recently asks Chi-fil-A to explain its sponsorship of “Level Ground,” a movement started in 2013 by two Fuller Theological Seminary students — one gay and one straight — to create “safe space for dialogue about faith, gender and sexuality through the arts.”
Participants in the group’s most recent film festival, held Oct. 8-10 in Nashville, Tenn., included former contemporary Christian artist Jennifer Knapp, who came out as a lesbian in 2005, and Karen Swallow Prior, a Liberty University English professor and research fellow for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Sponsors included Gracepointe Church, an evangelical church in Franklin, Tenn., that made headlines in January by coming out in support of marriage equality.
Mattingly wondered where the rest of the media was as Chick-fil-A edged away from its staunch opposition to the gay agenda:
If you run a Google News search on the logical words and phrases linked to this story, this is what you get – pretty much nothing, other than items on conservative news sites. This is a "conservative" story?
Anyone have any theories as to why this story drew zippo mainstream media ink? I mean, at the very least this could have – for Religion News Service – been seen as a chance to update a story like this one: "Chick-fil-A wings in new direction after gay flap." (You see what they did there in that headline? But does Chick-fil-A sell wings? Never mind.)
