Ethics

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New Yorker piece on crisis pregnancy centers incites rather than informs

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For some time now, I’ve been asking if it’s possible for The New Yorker to deliver a fair assessment of any conservative Christian group or person, which is why I was interested in a recent piece on crisis pregnancy clinics.

CPCs, as they are also called, aren’t always Christian although they tend to be.

They are 100 percent founded and run by the devout, who consider it a ministry to run them. These places make no money, really, and are sued, attacked, lied about or mischaracterized (as what happened in this outrageously biased NPR story) all the time.

The New Yorker’s religion reporter, Eliza Griswold, was sent on several visits to center in Terre Haute, Indiana. CPCs get their motives questioned in ways that Planned Parenthood clinics never are, so I was interested in how Griswold would approach the topic.  

On the door of a white R.V. that serves as the Wabash Valley Crisis Pregnancy Center’s mobile unit are the stencilled words “No Cash, No Narcotics.” The center, in Terre Haute, Indiana, is one of more than twenty-five hundred such C.P.C.s in the U.S.—Christian organizations that provide services including free pregnancy testing, low-cost S.T.D. testing, parenting classes, and ultrasounds. Sharon Carey, the executive director of the Wabash Valley center, acquired the van in January, 2018, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, after finding a company that retrofits secondhand vehicles with medical equipment. That May, Carey began to dispatch the van to rural towns whose residents often cannot afford the gas needed to drive to the C.P.C. or to a hospital.

The subhed for this story: “As rural health care flounders, crisis pregnancy centers are gaining ground,” so it’s clear where this article is headed.


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New 'playing God' technique to produce 'designer babies' may launch in a few months

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New 'playing God' technique to produce 'designer babies' may launch in a few months

One good reason to buy a costly ($189 a year) subscription to The Economist, Britain’s international weekly, is regular coverage of science developments like American newsweeklies used to provide.

Journalists should be alert to a significant scientific scoop in the Nov. 9 edition. Sometime in 2020, the Genomic Prediction Company of North Brunswick, New Jersey — GenomicPrediction.com — plans to fertilize donor eggs with mixed sperm from two gay fathers in California. This couple will then pick embryos to be implanted in a surrogate mother on the basis of purported lower health risks identified through SNP tests (single-nucleotide polymorphism or “snip”).

If successful, such experiments could launch a relatively smooth new path for “playing God” to create human “designer babies.” Not long ago this sort of thing was the stuff of sci-fi novels by H.G. Wells or Aldous Huxley. Now the human species itself enters the public furor over animal and vegetable GMOs and “Frankenfood.”

Writers pursuing this should start with The Economist’s three-pager (behind pay wall), which details the biological complexities of SNP that The Guy must bypass here. There’s also this accompanying editorial. Genomic Prediction’s Web site has further explanation, and you’ll want to keep in contact with the company for the news pegs (973–529-4223 or contact@genomicprediction.com).

Of course, environment and behavior also affect health outcomes. Proposed disease prevention would provide what seems to be a benign start for the Snip Era, but we can likely expect eventual efforts to pick embryos for implantation on the basis of, say, height or intelligence, as humanity veers toward the breeding of a super-race. Applications will inevitably be tilted toward affluent parents, posing a moral quandary.

Also, The Economist reports, eventual efforts to maximize scores that enhance brainpower and such could “increase the risk of genetic disorders” through spillover into a DNA malady known as pleiotropy. SNP has already been tried for animal husbandry with other species of mammals. Since 2008, it has proven to boost milk yields in dairy cows. But, The Economist says, these experimental cows “have become less fertile and have weaker immune systems. … Genetic tinkering may sometimes improve things. But by no means always.” Humanity beware!


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Reporters' reminders: (1) Two stories can be one story, so (2) watch religious media for ideas

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Reporters' reminders: (1) Two stories can be one story, so (2) watch religious media for ideas

The following is an example of how two separate stories can be analyzed as one story. It also demonstrates why the complete religion reporter working in the mainstream Media will continually look for material in specialized news outlets.

Story #1, which The Guy depicted April 4, is the demise of the once mighty Christian Booksellers Association, founded in 1950 at the beginning of the post-war evangelical boom and lately a victim of the woes hitting all brick-and-mortar retail. (The group was later renamed CBA: The Association for Christian Retail, to signify that members sold much more than books).

Story #2, which hit almost simultaneously, is the financial peril and potential collapse of what has been an equally prominent organization, National Religious Broadcasters, formed in 1944.

Writers can learn all the sorry details from a June 20 exploration on the website of freelance writer Julia Roys, a Nov. 6 follow-up for the watchdog group Ministry Watch by beat veteran Steve Rabey, and a rundown in the Sept. 28 issue of World magazine, which commendably has an investigative reporting team run by the author, Michael Reneau.

All three articles raise an important and related question journalists might pursue separately: In light of the NRB situation, can donors rely much on certification by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability?

Now, why does The Guy propose that the troubles of CBA and NRB be treated as a single story?

Despite their non-sectarian names, both organizations are thoroughly evangelical Protestant, and together have been key players in that U.S. movement in the same way for decades. Their two bustling trade shows each year were all-important for networking, shaping the subculture, promoting popular theologies and showcasing stars old and new.

Both were especially vital for the complex world of “parachurch” ministries, which lack the interconnections provided by denominations. The broadcasters’ group, whose meetings drew notables from U.S. presidents on down, also played a role in lobbying government on behalf of media interests.


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The Atlantic profiles Jeff Bezos's 'master plan' with nary a hint as to moral and spiritual sides

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Recently, the Atlantic published a cover story on Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, with a worth anywhere between $112 billion to $137 billion (it varies). The gist wasn’t so much Bezos’ money but how his use of it has made him the most powerful man in American culture.

The scary part isn’t so much the money part but how Bezos’ Amazon.com controls so much. Although the reporter wanted to know what makes the 55-year-old behind it all tick, he didn’t talk about Bezos’ spiritual-moral-ethical side at all or whether he even has one.

In the past, Bezos has sold himself as a values kind of guy, enjoying breakfasts with his family, doing the dishes every night and never scheduling work sessions before 10 a.m. according to this 2018 Wall Street Journal report that was based on a YouTube video (see above). At the time that story ran, Bezos’ extramarital affair was in full flower and one wonders if the tech exec was simply lying when he spoke about his supposedly serene domestic life.

Back to the Atlantic piece:

Today, Bezos controls nearly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States. More product searches are conducted on Amazon than on Google, which has allowed Bezos to build an advertising business as valuable as the entirety of IBM. One estimate has Amazon Web Services controlling almost half of the cloud-computing industry — institutions as varied as General Electric, Unilever, and even the CIA rely on its servers.

Forty-two percent of paper book sales and a third of the market for streaming video are controlled by the company; Twitch, its video platform popular among gamers, attracts 15 million users a day. Add The Washington Post to this portfolio and Bezos is, at a minimum, a rival to the likes of Disney’s Bob Iger or the suits at AT&T, and arguably the most powerful man in American culture. …

Since that time, Bezos’s reach has only grown. To the U.S. president, he is a nemesis. To many Americans, he is a beneficent wizard of convenience and abundance.

The story then sketches out a Brave New Worldesque kind of control that the Amazon founder will soon have over us all in an era when it and Google, Facebook and Apple have become the new robber barons of our age, monopolizing vast portions of the American economy.


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When is a Byzantine cross just a tattoo and when is it a reason to ask another question?

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On one level, this is a simple story about Culture Wars American in 2019.

A trans woman, a regular customer, is eating dinner in a local restaurant in a corner of America — the upper Midwest — where liberal and conservative citizens regularly bump into one another.

A pair of elderly locals is seated nearby and they make some unfriendly comments about the transexuals — not to the trans customer, but to their waitress. The waitress is triggered, when her boss insists that she serve these customers The woke NBC News double-decker headline outlines the outcome of this exchange in the marketplace of ideas:

'Morals over money': Waitress fired after refusing to serve transphobic customers

"Turning a blind eye to hate is just as bad as saying the hateful things in my opinion," the waitress, Brittany Spencer, said.

This is the stuff of shallow television news reports, of course. But here is the question that haunted a GetReligion reader: “Did anyone think to ask what's on her neck and what relevance it might have to morals??”

The waitress, you see, is heavily inked and she has a large, prominent tattoo on her neck that raises some interesting religious issues.

This tattoo includes a large Byzantine cross, of the style favored in Eastern churches — Orthodox and Eastern Rite Catholic — in Slavic lands and elsewhere.

But the cross is upside down.


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Oh yeah -- this post is about that RNS column on why journalists just can't 'get religion'

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If you ever needed proof that the editor of The New York Times saying something is what makes a point of view “real,” then check out the new Religion News Service opinion piece with this headline: “What it means to ‘get’ religion in 2020.”

Charles C. Camosy of Fordham University starts his “Purple Catholicism” column in a perfectly logical place. That would be the celebrated National Public Radio interview nearly three years ago in which Times executive editor Dean Baquet sort of admits that many journalists have trouble grasping the importance of religion in real life in America and around the world.

That’s the interview that, at the time, was marked with a GetReligion piece under the headline, “New York Times editor: We just don't get (a) religion, (b) the alt-right or (c) whatever.”

(RNS) — Following the 2016 presidential election, Dean Baquet, then executive editor of The New York Times, declared that one of his “big jobs” was to “really understand and explain the forces in America” that produced such a surprising result. Leading media organizations, he admirably admitted, simply do not “get religion.”

Baquet was right to be concerned. Otherwise sophisticated journalists and commentators regularly display minimal understanding of religion and how theological claims ought to function in public discourse. This not only hampers journalists’ ability to get to the heart of a story, it contributes much to the massive and growing distrust religious people tend to have of major media institutions.  

Comosy seems to assume that Baquet’s words brought this sad situation into the light of day, as opposed to millions of words of media-criticism and praise published here at GetReligion over nearly 17 years. I could note my cover story on this topic at The Quill in 1983, but that would be rather indecorous.

However, I will pause to be thankful for the first URL included in this RNS piece — the “minimal understand of religion” link — which points to at GetReligion post with this headline: “Mark Hemingway takes GetReligion-like stroll through years of New York Times religion gaffes.” Yes, that Mark Hemingway.

But here is the key to this piece: Rather than focusing on embarrassing religion errors that make it into print (even though errors are a sign of deeper issues), the RNS columnist digs deep into a philosophical issue noted many, many, many times at here at GetReligion. I am referring to the tendency by journalists that some subjects are “real” (politics and economics), while others are not so real (religion).

Here is the heart of the matter, from his perspective.


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Kings Bay nuclear protestors: Was this civil disobedience or a matter of religious liberty?

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It’s hard to live in Oak Ridge, Tenn., without learning a thing or two about civil disobedience, especially demonstrations linked to nuclear weapons. No matter what goes on inside the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — in terms of energy, medicine, the digital future, etc. — this top-secret research facility will always be known for its role in America’s history of atomic bombs and beyond.

This leads to protests. Some of them cross the line into civil disobedience, which raises interesting historical, legal and even theological questions. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

There is a very similar story unfolding elsewhere in the Bible Belt, as seen in a recent report — “Judge denies nuclear protesters’ religious freedom defense” — from Religion News Service. Here is the overture:

(RNS) — A federal judge has denied a request by a group of Catholic peace activists to dismiss charges against them for breaking into a nuclear submarine base in Kings Bay, Georgia, last year to protest nuclear weapons.

The seven activists, individually and through their lawyers, used a novel defense, citing the Religion Freedom Restoration Act, a 1993 federal law that says the government may not burden the faith practices of a person with sincerely held religious beliefs.

But Judge Lisa Godbey Wood, a federal judge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia, denied that defense and scheduled a jury trial for Oct. 21.

The activists, known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, face up to 25 years in prison each for trespassing on the U.S. Navy base, which houses six Trident submarines designed to carry nearly 200 nuclear warheads apiece. The seven, mostly middle-aged or elderly, will each stand trial on three felonies and one misdemeanor: destruction of property on a naval installation, depredation of government property, trespass and conspiracy.

Now, there are all kinds of questions I’d like to ask at this point.

First of all, I assume we are talking about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as opposed to the “Religion” Freedom Restoration Act that is mentioned here. RNS needs to make a correction.

But it would appear that the basic idea is that the protestors had a right to violate the law as an act of religious conscience. It would be interesting to know more the specifics of their claims.


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What a world we live in: 'Reality Criticized For Not More Clearly Distinguishing Itself From Satire'

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What a world we live in: 'Reality Criticized For Not More Clearly Distinguishing Itself From Satire'

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast — click here to tune that in — host Todd Wilken and I talked about the ongoing war between The Babylon Bee, a conservative Christian news satire site, and the progressive fact checker squad at Snopes.com.

Oh, and as often happens in discussions of religion and public life, the threat that (trigger warning) Chick-fil-A seems to pose to American civilization ended up in the mix.

Here’s a typical question from the discussion: Is it satire to satirize contemporary satire by pretending to think that the satire is actual real news?

Or something like that.

The bottom line is that real news is starting to sound like satire. As the Bee said the other day: “Reality Criticized For Not More Clearly Distinguishing Itself From Satire.” At the same time, lots of satire is starting to sound like subtle (or not so subtle) forms of real — or some would say “fake” — news. Take the top of this New Yorker piece for example:

Customers across the nation who turned out for Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day were in for a surprise, as the chicken restaurant chose today to launch a new product, Hate Sauce.

Delighted customers mobbed the restaurants to try the zesty new sauce, with many chicken fanciers ordering their sandwiches with extra hate. “It’s so spicy it makes your mouth feel like it’s on fire — like a gay couple in hell,” said Harland Dorrinson, who sampled the sauce at a Chick-fil-A in Orlando.

That’s pretty blunt and, thus, it’s easy to assume that it’s satire (which it is).

But how about the quotes in the following story about a Chick-fil-A war at the University of Kansas?

“KU granted Chick-fil-A, a bastion of bigotry, a prime retail location in the heart of our campus,” KU’s Sexuality & Gender Diversity Faculty and Staff Council said in a letter sent this week to Chancellor Doug Girod, the provost’s office and the athletic department.


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Pro-choice doctor on abortion and Israeli law: In this case, the story is complicated

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Frederica Mathewes-Green, a longtime friend of GetReligion and its founders, began her transformation into a pro-life activist in 1976, after reading a piece called “What I Saw at the Abortion” in Esquire. Read it and I predict you can tell the passage that grabbed her and would not let go.

We never quite know the potential of one honest essay or journalism feature to move a person’s conscience. This leads me to “I Found the Outer Limits of My Pro-choice Beliefs” by Chavi Eve Karkowsky, a specialist in maternal-fetal medicine, writing for The Atlantic.

Karkowsky remains resolutely pro-choice in her sympathies, as reflected in how she describes pro-lifers protesting at late-term abortion facilities as “screaming at [women] not to do what they have already spent days or weeks weeping about.” It’s odd that pro-lifers — diverse people who often protest in silence, pray the rosary, have calm conversations with women and offer to help them bring their babies to term — apparently can only scream in their mass-media appearances.

But I digress. Karkowsky’s new awareness of these outer limits emerges from a time of working in Israel, after her husband took a job there. Israel’s laws on abortion are more permissive than those in the United States, although they also require taking the decision to a Termination of Pregnancy Committee (va’ada), as Karkowsky explains:

In this majority-Jewish country with deep socialist roots, abortion law has never been constructed around the idea of a woman’s power over her own body, or around the value of fetal life. The basics of abortion law were passed in the 1970s, and were largely built around demographic concerns in a tiny collectivist country that, at the time, was almost continually at war. Though changes have been made, those foundational laws still prevail. In Israel, terminations of pregnancy, regardless of gestational age, must go through a committee, a va’ada. Without its assent, an abortion is officially a criminal offense. But here’s the surprise: In the end, more than 97 percent of abortion requests that come before the committee are approved.

The va’ada can approve abortions for specific reasons spelled out by the law: if the woman is over 40, under 18, or unmarried; if the pregnancy is the result of rape, an extramarital affair, or any illegal sexual relationship, such as incest; if the fetus is likely to have a physical or mental defect; if continuing the pregnancy would endanger the woman’s life or cause her mental or physical harm. Some of these rationales, such as rape and incest, are familiar from the U.S. abortion debate. Other justifications, such as those involving the woman’s age or marital status, bespeak a certain amount of social engineering, and may strike Americans as odd matters for the law to take into account.

Karkowsky describes herself as homesick for Roe v. Wade, which sounds ghoulish for a moment, but her explanation makes it warmer and — how to put this? — almost pro-natal:


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