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Creative ways to cover abortion stories near Roe v. Wade anniversary: Here's a few ideas

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Creative ways to cover abortion stories near Roe v. Wade anniversary: Here's a few ideas

I always get frustrated with the lack of original thought when it comes to covering abortion stories connected to the anniversaries of Roe v. Wade. Last week’s reporting for the 48th anniversary was no exception.

There was the predictable updates (which I am not criticizing), such as President Joe Biden’s intent to codify Roe v. Wade, which the Catholic-news website Crux covered here. And Fox News ran a piece about a restrictive abortion law passed by the state of Tennessee last summer , and how that has become ensnared in the courts.

Now I know that, with the inauguration on the same week and all, there wasn’t a lot of energy out there to come up with Roe v. Wade stories that covered new ground. But the stories are out there, folks. It’s just that many of those in the media don’t feel like ferreting them out. Let’s suggest a few:

(1) Since Black Lives Matter has been a major newsmaker this past year, how about a revisit on black abortion rates? About a year ago, the Arizona Capital Times ran this opinion piece by a black member of the state house of representatives. I’ll pull out one paragraph:

The impacts on our black communities are hard to fathom. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which generally supports abortion, in 2011 360,000 black babies were aborted. CDC statistics for 2011 show that 287,072 black deaths occurred from all other causes excluding abortion. By these numbers, abortion is the leading cause of death among blacks.

Shouldn’t there be more reporting on something that kills more black children than police brutality ever has? Can’t say I’ve seen a whole lot. This story is also linked to debates in the Black church about politics, social issues, family, etc.

(2) Personality profiles. The pro-choicers get loads of them, such as this 2018 Washington Post piece about a black gynecologist who went from being anti-abortion to pro-abortion rights — and why. This was Willie Parker. The Atlantic, however, went more creative and much deeper in a feature about a war in the abortion movement where Parker is being accused of sexual assault, and the nasty infighting that’s resulted from that. Insider politics is always an interesting read, must say.

But where are the profiles of folks like Lila Rose and Joan Andrews Bell and many other lesser-known folks?


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Evangelical 'power' and U.S. Capitol rioting: What about Franklin Graham and Falwell Jr.?

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Evangelical 'power' and U.S. Capitol rioting: What about Franklin Graham and Falwell Jr.?

As a rule, I don’t use GetReligion posts to respond to feedback from readers. But several people — in emails, for the most part — have raised two crucial, and valid, questions about last week’s “Crossroads” podcast and post: “New York Times says 'Christian nationalism' tied to white 'evangelical power'.”

Actually, it’s the same question asked in two different ways. Hold that thought.

In the podcast and post, I argued that a much-read New York Times piece (“How White Evangelical Christians Fused With Trump Extremism“) did a fine job while offering illustrations that conspiracy theories such as the QAnon gospel have soaked into many pews and a few pulpits, especially in independent (and often small) charismatic and evangelical churches. My question was whether the feature provided solid evidence for this thesis:

The blend of cultural references, and the people who brought them, made clear a phenomenon that has been brewing for years now: that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.

The key word was “power,” as in “some parts of evangelical power” becoming “inextricable” from the “most extreme” forms of Trump support — which has to be a reference to those who planned, not the legal National Mall rally for Trump, but the illegal armed attack on the U.S. Capitol.

In response, I wrote:

… Anyone who studies “evangelicalism” — white or otherwise — knows that we are talking about a movement based on the work of powerful denominations (this includes megachurches), parachurch groups, publishers (and authors) and major colleges, universities and seminaries.

This led to several people asking this valid question: What about the Rev. Franklin Graham? Others asked: What about Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Liberty University?

These are certainly examples of evangelical brand names — Graham and Falwell.


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Top 10 religion-news stories of 2020: Coronavirus pandemic touched almost everything

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Some years, picking the No. 1 religion story is a real challenge.

This year? Not so much.

Give the global pandemic credit for making at least one thing easy during 2020.

Let’s count down the Top 10 stories, as determined by Religion News Association members (including yours truly). I’ll sprinkle a few links to related stories into the RNA summaries:

10. “Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. resigns amid controversies including a risqué photo and an alleged sex scandal. Claims of sexual misconduct also made against late evangelical apologist Ravi Zacharias and Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz.”

9. “Pandemic-related limits on worship gatherings spur protests and defiance by Hasidic Jewish groups and evangelicals led by pastor John MacArthur and musician Sean Feucht. Supreme Court backs Catholic and Jewish groups' challenge to New York's limits.”

8. “A Vatican investigation into defrocked ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick found that bishops, cardinals and popes failed to heed reports of his sexual misconduct. Debate ensues over the legacy of sainted Pope John Paul II, who promoted him to cardinal.”

7. “Dozens of nations decry what they term widespread human-rights abuses by China against predominately Muslim Uighurs and others in Xinjiang region, many in detention camps. New U.S. law authorizes sanctions against Chinese officials deemed complicit.”

6. “White evangelicals and other religious conservatives again vote overwhelmingly for President Trump, despite some vocal dissent. Protestants fuel his gains among Hispanic voters. Some religious supporters echo his denials of the election results.”

5. “Police, using tear gas, drive anti-racism protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington, clearing way for President Trump to pose for a controversial photo with a Bible at historic St. John’s Church. Episcopal, other faith leaders express outrage.”


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Fights over First Amendment rights will likely top religion-beat agenda in 2021 and beyond

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What's on the agenda for journalism about religion in the United States in 2021 and beyond?

Ongoing fights about the First Amendment and religious liberty are likely to prove the most newsworthy, but two other themes deserve attention.

A prior Religion Guy Memo here at GetReligion surveyed the competing partisan concepts of "religious freedom" that face the United States and the incoming Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration, with potential for big conflicts if Democrats win both Senate runoffs in Georgia.

One aspect is religious groups' desire to be exempt from anti-discrimination laws so they can hire doctrinally like-minded employees, while qualifying for federal grants. Lame duck Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia (son of the late Supreme Court justice) wrapped up the Donald Trump years with an important "final rule" to nail down and clarify exemption rights. It goes into effect a dozen days before Biden's inauguration.

Understandably, much news like this was all but ignored by media focused on COVID-19developments and President Trump's remarkable, fruitless efforts to erase the 2020 election returns, supported at the U.S. Supreme Court by 60 percent of House Republicans and the GOP attorneys general of 18 states.

Labor's “final rule” policies could be re-examined in the Biden years. The huge text (.pdf here) provides journalists full documentation on religious employment disputes as seen from the conservative side of the culture wars, and summarizes 109,000 officially filed comments pro and con.

The rule clarifies that exempt groups need not be connected to specific house of worship (as with many schools and Protestant "parachurch" organizations) and that even for-profit companies can qualify if they have "a substantial religious purpose." It states that "religion" covers not only creedal beliefs but "all aspects of religious observance and practice." The rule allows exemptions of religious groups that provide "secular" help, relying on the 9th Circuit appeals ruling in Spencer v. World Vision (read text here).

Importantly, Labor's new rule says religious organizations cannot ignore anti-discrimination protections regarding "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" in situations where "there is no religious basis for the action."


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Thinking about Xavier Becerra: A conservative Catholic checklist of sure-fire news stories

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First things first. Yes, the following think piece is from a conservative Catholic news source.

But there are times when doctrinally conservative Catholic folks need to read the National Catholic Reporter. And this is a time when doctrinally liberal Catholics — and journalists, especially — should read and mark up an article from the National Catholic Register.

Here’s why: This essay contains a long checklist of valid story ideas, as in issues from the past that are almost certain to come up again in the near future. You can see this in the long, long second line in this Register headline:

What a Xavier Becerra HHS Could Mean for Catholics

Becerra’s record in California shows that he, perhaps more than any other state attorney general, has been willing to wield the power of the state to enforce pro-abortion policies against religious and pro-life groups.

Now it’s true that, for conservative Catholics, this story is packed with potential public-policy nightmares, in terms of their impact on traditional Catholic groups and ministries. Can you say “Little Sisters of the Poor”?

At the same time, many — but not all — Catholic liberals will cheer if some of these policy showdowns come to pass.

In terms of doctrine and church-state law, Catholics on the left and right will have radically different views of Becerra being handed this crucial high ground in the culture wars. Evangelicals who lead colleges and universities will be concerned, as well.

But that’s beside the point, if one looks at this piece through the eyes of a religion-beat professional (or even an open-minded scribe on the political desk) who is looking for valid stories to cover. Journalists need to read all of this, but here are a few items that demonstrate what I am saying. Spot the potential stories in this passage:


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How should Biden-era Americans understand 'religious freedom' and First Amendment?

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THE QUESTION:

What does American “religious freedom” now mean?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Protection of Americans’ “free exercise” of religion has been guaranteed by the Bill of Rights for 229 years and counting.

Until recently, people generally agreed on what this means. The debates involved whether this constitutional right should be exercised or restricted in specific, unusual situations. For example, the Supreme Court has permitted the Santeria faith to conduct ritual slaughter of animals, and exempted Amish teens from mandatory high school attendance laws.

Now this principle is swept up into culture wars that divide the population and the two political parties. In October, the Brookings Institution, a moderately liberal think tank, issued a lengthy white paper titled “A Time to Heal, A Time to Build” with recommendations on religion policy for the U.S. president. It states that the older consensus “began breaking down as new issues emerged, particularly around the struggle for LGBTQ equality.” Brookings consulted 127 experts on church and state for this document, though few were from the so-called “religious right.”

Consider some history: Back in 1993, Democrats were central in passage of the federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Then-Congressman Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, introduced the bill in the House, where it won 170 co-sponsors and easily passed by voice vote. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy, a Catholic, was the Senate co-sponsor with Republican Orrin Hatch, a Latter-day Saint, and the act was approved 97–3. President Bill Clinton, a Protestant, enthusiastically signed it into law.

The act states that government cannot “substantially burden” the “exercise of religion,” even when the burden applies to people generally, unless limiting of the freedom is “the least restrictive means” to further a “compelling governmental interest.” Those whose freedom is wrongly suppressed have the right to “obtain appropriate relief” in court. (This restored prior U.S. Supreme Court doctrine that the court had shelved in its 1990 Smith ruling.)

That was then.


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Podcast: NYTimes op-ed offers sharp media criticism on SCOTUS and religious liberty

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In light of trends in the past year or so, the op-ed page of The New York Times was the last place I expected to find sharp media criticism focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Amendment and, to be specific, religious liberty concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. Miracles happen, I guess.

Here’s the context. There was, of course, a tsunami of press coverage of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision overturning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aggressive rules controlling in-person religious services in New York. Frankly, the coverage was all over the place (and let’s not get started discussing the Twitter madness) and I had no idea how to write about it.

Thus, I was both stunned and pleased to read the recent Times op-ed that ran with this headline: “The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Religious Restrictions.” That essay provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

This op-ed was written by a former federal judge named Michael W. McConnell, who directs the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and Max Raskin, an adjunct law professor at New York University. While their essay includes lots of interesting information about the logic of the recent ruling, GetReligion readers will be interested in its commentary on how the decision was viewed in public discourse — including media coverage.

Here is a crucial block of material at the top that includes some specific facts that would have been appropriate in news stories:

Unfortunately, the substance of the decision has been drowned out by a single-minded focus on judicial politics — the first evidence that President Trump’s appointments to the court are making a difference. Maybe that is so. In the first two pandemic-related worship-closure cases to get to the court this year, it declined to intervene by 5-to-4 votes, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Democrat-appointed justices in deferring to state regulators. Last week’s decision went in favor of the Catholic and Orthodox Jewish plaintiffs, with the chief justice in dissent.

But politics is a distorted lens for understanding the case. Looking to the substance, six justices agreed that the Free Exercise Clause was probably violated by the governor’s order. The restrictions, which are far more draconian than those approved by the court in the earlier cases, are both extraordinarily tight and essentially unexplained. In red zones, where infection rates are the highest, worship is limited to 10 persons, no matter how large the facility — whether St. Patrick’s Cathedral (seating capacity: 2,500) or a tiny shul in Brooklyn. Because Orthodox Jewish services require a quorum (“minyan”) of 10 adult men, this is an effective prohibition on the ability of Orthodox women to attend services.

In other words, many journalists and public intellectuals — I am shocked, shocked by this — decided that Trump-era political divisions were more important than information about the legal and religious realities at pew level.


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Parts of pope's new book may be woke, but news coverage hasn't told the whole story

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While most of you were either shopping for your Thanksgiving meal or preparing it, Pope Francis was busy promoting his new book.

To be fair, the pontiff wasn’t doing exactly that in the same way as other authors, who typically make TV appearances and do book signings at your local bookstore.

Instead, the pope was getting the word out in other ways. The book, titled Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future, was excerpted in the Italian daily La Repubblica, a left-wing newspaper not shy about highlighting the pope’s more woke leanings over the past few years.

The excerpt earned widespread media coverage and praise. The Associated Press, in its Nov. 23 news account after attaining an advance copy, ran with the headline: “Pope book backs George Floyd protests, blasts virus skeptic.”

The key to this story is that this book comes at a time when the Catholic church is deeply divided along doctrinal and political lines. How was this issue handled? Here’s how the story opens:

Pope Francis is supporting demands for racial justice in the wake of the U.S. police killing of George Floyd and is blasting COVID-19 skeptics and media organizations that spread their conspiracies in a new book penned during the Vatican’s coronavirus lockdown.

In “Let Us Dream,” Francis also criticizes populist politicians who whip up rallies in ways reminiscent of the 1930s, and the hypocrisy of “rigid” conservative Catholics who support them. But he also criticizes the forceful downing of historic statues during protests for racial equality this year as a misguided attempt to “purify the past.”

The 150-page book, due out Dec. 1, was ghost-written by Francis’ English-language biographer, Austen Ivereigh, and at times the prose and emphasis seems almost more Ivereigh’s than Francis.’ That’s somewhat intentional — Ivereigh said Monday he hopes a more colloquial English-speaking pope will resonate with English-speaking readers and believers.

At its core, “Let Us Dream” aims to outline Francis’ vision of a more economically and environmentally just post-coronavirus world where the poor, the elderly and weak aren’t left on the margins and the wealthy aren’t consumed only with profits.

It should be noted that the news story deals mostly with Floyd and the pandemic because the press release issued by Simon & Schuster to go with the book that was made available to reporters and reviewers highlighted those sections.

In other words, the press office there knew how to preach to the choir.


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Pastor John MacArthur and California church closings: Why isn't this a national story?

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One of the more interesting church-state fights during this COVID-19 crisis has been one involving Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles. John MacArthur, its 81-year-old revered pastor, has become an unlikely government foe during this time, as he’s refused to close down his church all along.

Readers may recall that I wrote about him a year ago when he told noted Southern Baptist Bible study leader Beth Moore to “go home.”

Yes, that guy. Coverage has been spotty at best, although this is not necessarily reporters’ fault. The church isn’t known for answering media calls. When I tried contacting them this past summer, I got the cold shoulder as well.

That said, a lot more reporting is needed on why California has the strictest restrictions in the country against indoor church services — to the point that even the Catholics are rebelling. In September, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone organized a “free the Mass” event involving three eucharistic processions that first went to city hall, then to the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption where the archbishop held an outdoor Mass.

Indoor worship services are banned in California, a state of megachurches. You don’t have to be a religion expert to know that restriction wasn’t going to fly, especially when stores and other businesses had no similar restrictions. Outdoor rites? California may have more sunny weather than many other states, but it still gets cold there.

It’s been very confusing to figure out what's going on with this church, as the story resembles a large elephant that appears differently depending on the observer. For instance, the Christian Post says that Grace Community had been released of all restrictions.

Public health officials in Los Angeles have lifted all outbreak-related requirements and restrictions on Grace Community Church, which were put in place last month after three cases connected to the California church were confirmed.

“We are glad to announce that we received a notice from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health … saying that we have been cleared of COVID-19 outbreak,” the church says on its website.


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