On February 24, Washington Post reporter John Wagner sympathetically covered leading Maryland Democrats (and Catholics) for crossing their hierarchy to lobby for "gay marriage" -- without seeming to contact this hierarchy. So when Wagner sympathetically profiled House Speaker Michael Busch -- again -- at the top of the April 11 Style section, the primary question was: How was this "news," a full month after the gay lobby failed to pass it? The headline was "A matter of conscience: Speaker Mike Busch found a new perspective for Maryland's same-sex marriage bill." It was considered an awakening of conscience that Speaker Busch wept:
Busch, whose hunched 6-foot-1 frame still bears witness to the standout running back he was at Temple University, retreated to his office at the side of the House chamber. He apologized for the bill’s failure to a few of its leading supporters. They thanked him for his efforts. And then another unusual event happened: With them, he cried.
“It was a gut-wrenching process to go through,” Busch recalled later. “I could see how much it meant to the people in the caucus who are gay, how much it pained them and what it would have meant for their lives. These are people you see every day and you like and you respect and are colleagues. So I was — I was emotionally, physically and mentally spent.”
Wouldn't it make more sense to take the occasion of the gay-marriage bill failing to cover the winning side, even just to gauge how that result occurred? But once again, all the Post's column inches were lovingly poured out on how moving it was for gay legislators to describe their lifelong oppression by organized and orthodox religion, for example, Heather Mizeur:
A third spoke of her struggle from the time she was a little girl to square being gay with her Catholicism, a religion that Busch shares.
“I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed,” she said as the chamber fell silent. “I prayed it would go away.”
....Del. Heather R. Mizeur (D-Mongtomery) was speaking about her efforts to reconcile being gay and Catholic.
“By the time I was in college . . . I realized that never once in my conversations with God did God tell me it was wrong,” she told her colleagues. “It was the church’s hierarchy that was telling me it was wrong. It was the kids on the school bus that were taunting people. . . . It was always something external to me.”
Post readers are supposed to be thrilled by Wagner's recounting of how Busch converted -- in effect, how he left Catholic church teaching in the dust and embraced hard-left identity politics. The Catholic hierarchy is a distant villain, never to be contacted. Once again, Wagner and his Post editors couldn't even bring themselves to cite their names, like the Bishops were named Voldemort:
“I evolved from that position,” Busch said as he stabbed a fork into his apple and cheddar crepes at a preferred haunt, a French restaurant a short walk from the State House.
As speaker, Busch has been widely credited with promoting women and African Americans to leadership posts, part of a commitment to civil rights that he said dates from his days at Temple University in the 1960s. And he had no problem with expanding rights for another class of people. But Busch bristled at using “marriage” to describe gay nuptials. “Civil unions” was his preferred term, because “marriage” brought to mind religious associations.
Once it became clear that gay lawmakers and their allies planned a big push for a marriage bill this year, Busch signaled that he would give the initiative a chance — not because he believed in it personally, but because he saw it as his job to support the majority of House Democrats who do.
Busch said his personal conversion came only after he was forced to focus on the issue, through a series of conversations in the weeks leading up to the debate. Both Maryland and federal law contain hundreds of references to the term “marriage” — in matters related to health care, inheritance and tax policy. Several gay delegates argued to him that the only way to convey those rights was to use the term.
And there was something ugly about “civil unions” as well. “It’s just like ‘separate but equal,’ ” Del. Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. (D-Baltimore), the grandson of a major civil rights leader in Maryland, told Busch.
“I thought to myself, ‘They’re right,’ ” Busch recalled. “People have always put barriers in front of people who are different than them.”
That's an ironic sentence, since the Washington Post seems to always puts barriers in front of people who think differently than them. The barriers say "You will not be quoted in our newspaper until you surrender to our social conscience."
