GetReligion
Saturday, March 29, 2025

gay rights

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'Special pleaders,' church-state issues and the new Republican shape of the U.S. Congress

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'Special pleaders,' church-state issues and the new Republican shape of the U.S. Congress

Good stories lurk in ideology-driven magazines and web sites on the religion beat, perhaps more so than with other fields.

For example, there’s often useful fare blended with the partisanship of Church & State, monthly house organ of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. This lobby and litigator closely monitors those it assails as “far-right religious conservatives,” provides some useful information and is always happy to brief reporters on its side of an issue.

Consider, for example, the cover story in Church & State’s current issue, “New Congress, New Challenges,” by assistant communications director Simon Brown. Republicans rode to victory on “fundamentalist support,” he says, so “2015 could be a cataclysmic year for church-state separation.”

Stripped of the tendentious rhetoric and alarmism, Brown assembles some good tips. As he observes, during the next two years the Republican-run Congress may revive hot-button religion bills that previously died in committee or passed the G.O.P House but not the Democratic Senate. They would:


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What is this? Long on excitement, short on attribution, USA Today declares gay marriage 'inevitable'

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As faithful readers know, GetReligion advocates the traditional American model of the press.

That model relies on journalists presenting facts — attributed to named sources — in a fair, unbiased manner. That's opposed, of course, to the one-sided, advocacy, European-styled approach to reporting the news.

Which leads us a 1,700-word item today from USA Today with this provocative headline:

Gay marriage, once inconceivable, now appears inevitable

Care to guess which journalistic approach this "news" story by the national newspaper's Supreme Court correspondent takes?

To help answer that question, count (1) the number of named sources in the story's breathless first five paragraphs and (2) the number of unattributed opinions better suited for an editorial than a straight news report.


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Interview or argument? There's a difference, CNN

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Watch this video and take a swig of an adult beverage every time Chris Cuomo interrupts Bill Donohue. Cuomo brought Donohue onto CNN’s morning show New Day in the latter’s role as head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. The topic was the Arizona law that was just vetoed by Governor Jan Brewer. As you may recall, the law would have allowed anyone to decline to do business with someone on religious grounds. Gays were believed to have been the main targets, in sympathy with Christians who believe homosexuality is wrong.

Meaty stuff for a discussion, to be sure. What if the businessman believes blacks are inferior? Conversely, without the law, would a Jewish photographer be forced to shoot pictures at a Klan or skinhead wedding?

And the talk is actually pretty productive for the first half of the interview. But then Cuomo makes it a quarrel. Either that or badgering. Sometimes he doesn’t even wait for Donohue to finish a sentence before adding more preachments thinly veiled as questions.


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Report both sides of the story, unless you're at the Huffington Post

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A bill dealing with gay weddings is being hotly debated in Kansas, but not in a Huffington Post article about it. The clumsily titled “Being Gay Ain’t Okay in Kansas” would fit well in a journalism textbook chapter on one-sided reporting. The article, summarizing a HuffPost Live video, loads the first paragraph with the warning that the bill, if passed, “would allow discrimination against same-sex couples on the basis of religious beliefs.” It then quotes legislator Emily Perry, interviewed in the video, and doesn’t go much beyond that point for the next 200 words or so.

The three-page bill itself seems pretty straightforward. Its main point is that:

[N]o individual or religious entity shall be required by any governmental entity to do any of the following, if it would be contrary to the sincerely held religious beliefs of the individual or religious entity regarding sex or gender:


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Wind of change comes sweeping down the plain

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My home state of Oklahoma made big news Tuesday when a federal judge struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. The New York Times noted that the ruling occurred in the “heart of the Bible Belt,” while The Associated Press characterized Oklahoma as “the buckle of the Bible Belt.” (Religion angle, anyone?)

For the Tulsa World — whose banner headline today proclaimed “Gay marriage wins” — the ruling hit especially close to home, and not just because a Tulsa-based judge made the ruling. Two of the four plaintiffs are World editors, a connection that — to its credit — the Tulsa newspaper made clear in its story.

A friend of mine who works for the World remarked on his Facebook page that “it’s not often you walk into the newsroom and watch news happen in front of your face. Like national news kind of stuff.”


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Say what?!? Organ music at 'Duck Dynasty' church?

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The White's Ferry Road Church of Christ in West Monroe, La., is making headlines these days as the home congregation of the Robertson family of "Duck Dynasty" fame.

For me, mention of the White's Ferry Road church brings back fond memories totally unrelated to duck hunting or reality television. That's because – for two years during my early childhood – the Ouachita River community of West Monroe was my hometown and the White's Ferry Road church my home congregation, as I shared in a 2012 column.

In light of the controversy over "Duck Dynasty" patriarch Phil Robertson's comments on homosexuality, The Associated Press sent a reporter to cover Sunday services at the Louisiana church this past weekend.

The top of the story:


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A same-sex marriage story that makes you go hmmmmm ...

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Here at GetReligion, we’ve repeatedly highlighted the apparent new normal on mainstream media coverage of same-sex marriage.


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Yo! New York Post! Did that school have a Catholic doctrinal covenant?

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This story is getting very, very familiar and it’s clear that these lawsuits are happening for a reason.


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