GetReligion
Tuesday, April 01, 2025

LGBTQ

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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

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Podcast: Big Sexual Revolution victory in New York! Where's the elite news coverage?

I think I heard this D.C. Beltway question for the first time during the George W. Bush years, when I moved back to greater Baltimore and began teaching full-time at the Washington Journalism Center. It was a time of high expectations for cultural conservatives. As is usually the case, they faced disappointment when wins by the cultural left continued, even though W. Bush was “in power.”

The question: What happens to culturally conservative Republicans when they get elected to, oh, the U.S. Senate and then immediately start losing their nerve?

I heard an interesting answer during an off-the-record chat session with some Senate staffers. It helps to remember that this was back in the day when many people still had radios in their cars that had button systems that allowed them a limited number of pre-set stations they could quickly punch while driving.

The answer: There are two kinds of Republicans inside the Beltway — those who have NPR as the first button on their car radios and those who do not.

Unpacking that answer was crucial to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in), which focused on media coverage, or the lack thereof, about a recent court ruling in an important LGBTQ rights case in New York.

Ah, but was this a case that LGBTQ-rights activists and Sexual Revolution evangelists wanted to see publicized? That’s one of the questions that host Todd Wilken and I discussed.

We will work our way back to the NPR symbolism angle. But first, here is some key material from the top of a New York Post report that ran with this headline: “NYC judge rules polyamorous unions entitled to same legal protections as 2-person relationships.” This is long, but important. First, there is this:

In the case of West 49th St., LLC v. O’Neill, New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan reportedly concluded that polyamorous relationships are entitled to the same sort of legal protection given to two-person relationships.


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Catholic voters and the midterm elections: Mainstream news blitz ignores major voter bloc

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Catholic voters and the midterm elections: Mainstream news blitz ignores major voter bloc

We are in the middle of another election season and in full mud-slinging mode.

Elections are an annual occurrence, to one degree or another, but the vote that will dominate this Nov. 8 are known as the midterms. It’s when a majority of seats in both the House and Senate are up for grabs, allowing for the party in the minority (in this case the Republicans in both chambers) to potentially becoming the majority. Midterm elections are also traditionally viewed as referendums on presidents.

This takes us to the Catholic vote and its impact on the outcome. This is a topic that is receiving little or no mainstream press coverage. As we say here at GetReligion: “Hold that thought.”

While inflation and crime will certainly be on the minds of most as they cast ballots, “culture war” issues are very much alive and well. Abortion, especially after this June’s Supreme Court decision that once again made it a state issue after Roe v. Wade was rolled back, will certainly be an issue.

There have been many, many news stories about how the abortion issue will motivate those on the political left to come out and vote following the Dobbs decision. The Washington Post, on Oct. 8, reported on the issue in a news feature that appeared under the headline, “Women powered Democrats in the 2018 midterms. Will they again in 2022?”

After opening with two Colorado women, Robin Kupernik and Elizabeta Stacishin, who had joined forces in 2016 to combat Donald Trump, who was elected to the presidency that year. This is the feature’s thesis:

In the 2018 midterm elections, women like Kupernik and Stacishin were part of a women-led army that changed politics. Women who had never been particularly active politically worked phone banks, wrote postcards and sent text messages to voters. They were repulsed by Trump and determined to do something about it.

They met in small groups, marched in the streets and went door-to-door to encourage people to vote for Democrats. Their passions were palpable. Many of the congressional candidates they were supporting flipped Republican-held seats, all part of a political tide strong enough to flush the GOP from control of the House, dealing Trump a major defeat. The Pew Research Center has estimated that 62 percent of White women with college degrees backed Democrats for the House four years ago.

That has become the major press-coverage storyline of the midterms.


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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

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Press quiet as a mouse when it comes to Catholic angles in this Disney-DeSantis fight

I was never nuts for Disney. I’ve never been to one of their a theme park, either as a child or now as a parent of two children, and never indulged in their movies much over my lifetime. I’ll freely admit that puts me in the minority, both in the United States and around the world, when it comes to Disney consumption.

I was, however, once a Disney employee. No, I didn’t work in one of their stores. Instead, I was employed at ABC News in New York, where I worked for their digital unit running the website and other internet assets such as social media. It was a great place to work — although not “The Happiest Place On Earth” as the official tagline for Disneyland states. It was, after all, a newsroom — but one of the perks was free tickets each year to their amusement parks.

I say all this in the context of the ongoing feud regarding the Florida “Parental Rights in Education” bill, which is now law after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it. This is the much-discussed bill that bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade “in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

The law continues to get media coverage for two reasons. First, because of Disney’s involvement and second due to the larger notion that DeSantis, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, is — everyone chant the media mantra — “engaging in a culture war.” This remains a political story, a business story and a pop culture story.

Is this also an important religion story? It certainly is (tmatt takes on this very topic in GetReligion’s most recent podcast).

My most recent GetReligion post focused on the news media’s largely ignoring the Republican DeSantis’ Catholic faith in regard to the widespread news coverage around the bill, which opponents effectively labeled “Don’t Say Gay” even though the bill never used those words.

At the same time, the news coverage for conservative press around the legislation has centered much more on Disney’s late-in-the-game activism in opposing it. The coverage among mainstream and progressive news sites continues to center on that activist “Don’t Say Gay” mantra.


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As Florida's DeSantis wages culture war, his Catholic faith isn't news -- unless it's used to attack him

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As Florida's DeSantis wages culture war, his Catholic faith isn't news -- unless it's used to attack him

The two things that lots of people don’t want to read about these days is the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump, part of a larger trend regarding news fatigue in this country. Unfortunately, this post will mention both and only because it is about Ron DeSantis.

The Florida governor has been in the news the past few years because of his connection to the former president and a virus that paralyzed the planet for two years. A hero to the right and bogeyman to the left, DeSantis has received plenty of mainstream news coverage — much of it one-sided — because of his use of so-called culture war issues to push legislation.

DeSantis, who is running for re-election and among the favorites to run for the White House in 2024, has been a lightning rod for Democrats and a focus of criticism from the mainstream press for the last two years. His actions regarding COVID-19 were at odds with how blue states handled the virus, often catapulting him to national attention.

While the coverage has predictably focused on politics, the religion-news hooks in these stories have largely been ignored — unless they were highlighted to be used against him. The bottom line: DeSantis is not the kind of Catholic who draws cheers from journalists who admire progressive Catholics.

Those angles were once again set aside by the press coverage of the recent debate about the state’s sex-education bill.

As political conservatives and liberals battled it out over the merits of this bill, the press ignored DeSantis’ Catholic faith throughout the past few weeks of coverage.

The legislation — which the press insisted on calling the “Don’t Say Gay” bill — was, as the Associated Press recently noted, the following:

Since its inception, the measure has drawn intense opposition from LGBTQ advocates, students, national Democrats, the White House and the entertainment industry, amid increased attention on Florida as Republicans push culture war legislation and DeSantis ascends in the GOP as a potential 2024 presidential candidate.

There’s a lot to unpack in that paragraph, but mostly for what’s not mentioned.


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The New Yorker torches Teen Challenge residential programs in vivid, one-sided report

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The New Yorker torches Teen Challenge residential programs in vivid, one-sided report

This must be the season for exposés on Christian youth ministries.

Business Insider just came out with a huge piece on Young Life and a lot of folks are talking about the New Yorker’s recent exposé on the Christian drug rehab organization, Teen Challenge. Based on 60-plus interviews, it’s about one teen-aged girl’s story of being taken from her adopted parents’ home in the middle of the night and forced into a hellish residential program in central Florida.

The story has been framed as Teen Challenge attacking gay teens, although Emma, the central character, arrives at the school pregnant and ends up marrying a man four years later. Much of the story is about how she was forced to give up her child while sequestered at Teen Challenge.

It’s important, when reading this vivid story, to keep asking: Where are the voices on the other side of this drama?

Many of the events reported by The New Yorker took place a decade ago. Here’s how it started:

In the spring of her freshman year of high school, in 2011, Emma Burris was woken at three in the morning. Someone had turned on the lights in her room. She was facing the wall and saw a man’s shadow. She reached for her cell phone, which she kept under her pillow at night, but it wasn’t there. The man, Shane Thompson, who is six and a half feet tall, wore a shirt with “Juvenile Transport Agent” printed on the back. He and a colleague instructed Emma to put on her clothes and follow them to their car. “She was very verbal, resisting,” Thompson told me. Her parents, who had adopted her when she was seven, stood by the doorway, watching silently.

Thompson drove Emma away from her house, in Royal Palm Beach, Florida, and merged onto the highway. Emma, who was fifteen, tried to remember every exit sign she passed, so that she could find her way home, but she was crying too hard to remember the names. …

Part Scottish and part Puerto Rican, Emma was slight, with long, wavy blond hair. Her parents, whose lives revolved around their church, admonished her for being aggressive toward them and for expressing her sexuality too freely. She watched lesbian pornography and had lost her virginity to an older boy.

“Being aggressive toward them?”


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Chicago Tribune's take on Moody Bible student lacks some tough, logical questions

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Chicago Tribune's take on Moody Bible student lacks some tough, logical questions

One of the rules of journalism is to make clear why a reader should care what you’re writing about.

One way to make that happen is to choose a sympathetic figure. Personal stories are always easier to grasp than abstract concepts such as teachings, doctrines and beliefs. This principle has been used brilliantly by movements seeking to push modernist ideas, such as gay marriage. It’s one thing to oppose the idea; it’s another to oppose two human beings right in front of you.

Those of us who covered the Episcopal Church’s slide from an influential denomination of 3.6 million members into a fast-declining church of 1.8 million saw this principle used repeatedly in the 1990s and 2000s. Whenever the denomination wanted to push some novel sexual idea, it put forth stories of the courageous individuals who indulged in such practices. Such folks were easier to like than the seemingly stodgy types who were bent on keeping to the old ways.

All of which is why the Chicago Tribune chose a 24-year-old lesbian who was hounded by Moody Bible Institute administrators to be the face of a new lawsuit. An engaging dissident with a compelling story was far more interesting than the traditional institution she was fighting. The story begins:

Megan Steffen had completed all her college coursework at Moody Bible Institute and was at home with her parents in Michigan, waiting to graduate, when she got an email from the school, telling her an administrator needed to talk with her.

She agreed to a meeting via Zoom, where she learned that faculty members at the conservative Christian college had raised objections to her graduation.

Which was in 2020, by the way.

Then the two administrators on the Zoom call began asking questions, among them: Had Steffen ever had romantic or sexual relations with a woman? Had she ever dated men? Did she envision dating women in the future?


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Ties that bind Joe Biden and Cardinal Gregory: How will Catholic issues shape the news?

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Politics and religion can make for strange bedfellows. We know that from the past four years and the cozy alliance President Donald Trump forged with conservative Christians.

Evangelicals and traditional Catholics in large numbers voted for Trump over the last two elections, many with enthusiasm and others with great reluctance. The fallout from that voter trend will be felt for years to come.

President-elect Joe Biden is the nation’s second Catholic president, the first since John F. Kennedy in 1960. Biden didn’t run away from his faith in 2020. Instead, he embraced it.

Biden’s brand of Catholicism resonated with the mainstream press and many voters. The election now over, how Biden navigates the complicated world of the church’s hierarchy will be a big storyline.

There will be a general sense of calm in news coverage once Biden starts his term. That means the typical honeymoon period offered every president (with the exclusion of Donald Trump) will stretch far beyond the first 100 days.

How religion is covered in this climate — and Catholicism specifically — by mainstream newsrooms will affect many news stories. Look for stories that celebrate any and all Catholic images and teachings cited by Biden in support of left-of-center political efforts. There will be a revival on the religious left.

Coverage during recent weeks may serve as a prelude to what’s to come.

Many journalists feel that the press helped elect Trump, offering waves of coverage of his candidacy during the GOP primaries before the 2016 election. This year, the Hunter Biden scandal offered the press a chance to beat up on Joe Biden and we could have seen a repeat of 2016. Instead, the press ignored the scandal — with help from Big Tech — and blamed it on Russian disinformation.

With the election now over, we have learned that there was an investigation underway and that this topic would have been fair game for coverage.

You don’t need to be a Trump fan to see that many professionals in America’s press have gone astray. Many journalists are now rationalizing an advocacy brand of journalism, instead of doing what they traditionally have been paid to do — report the facts and give readers and viewers unbiased reporting.

How will these trends affect coverage of Biden’s faith and Catholicism in this country?


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Pope Francis' same-sex union media storm opens another front in a Catholic civil war

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If you think about it, journalism is about conflict. A news story is generally about an issue and how two sides (or more) view said issue. The top of the story, known as the lede, is about something someone said or did. The rest is information to support that new information.

In 2020, of course, all that is easier said than done. The fast-paced nature of news in the Internet age, the concept of objectivity being questioned by some mainstream journalists and this desperate need by some to highlight one side over another has made for some murky waters in the news.

Case in point: Pope Francis’ bold proclamation released on October 21 that he endorsed civil same-sex unions. Clearly, this announcement represented some kind of turning point for the Roman Catholic church, a change in tradition on LGBTQ rights and the dawn of a new, more loving era.

Well, that’s what the mainstream press said. Here’s how The New York Times opened its report:

Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks revealed in a documentary film that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.

The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten what the church considers traditional marriage — between one man and one woman.

“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said in the documentary, “Francesco,” which debuted at the Rome Film Festival, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”

Clearly, the pope — as head of the church — had in three sentences changed Catholicism forever.

Not so fast, said numerous on-the-record voices in the world of Catholicism.

This was typical Francis, who is known for his off-the-cuff comments (as the Times story noted) that often come into direct conflict with doctrine or they appear to do so. The key is that they produce a tsunami of headlines and news reports.

I have found that the news media isn’t so great at parsing Francis’ statements on deadline. Whenever they do, it is often to highlight Francis as a progressive who heads an evolving church.

It is also crucial that some major Catholic voices tend to be overlooked in the coverage. For example, did you hear what the Archdiocese of New York said, in response to these Pope Francis comments?


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Debate prep for journalists: Here are some 'Catholic questions' for Biden and Trump

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The election season goes into hyperdrive this month with the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden that will take place tomorrow in Cleveland.

Since the first presidential debate in 1960, and their resumption in 1976, the format has generally been the same: candidates answer questions posed to them from a moderator.

The first debate will be held on the campus shared by Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic. The nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has announced that Fox News anchor Chris Wallace will moderate. Wallace, a respected journalist and son of 60 Minutes legend Mike Wallace, is known for his tough questions and being fair. The president is not fond of him, to say the least.

As with anything involving Trump, expect fireworks.

That’s always the case when Trump takes the stage. Trump’s debate performance during the Republican primaries four years ago got the real estate scion the nomination in a very crowded field that included contenders like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, both Catholics.

As early voting continues across the country and debate intensifies over replacing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, this first debate will be key for those undecided voters, especially ones living in battleground states that matter when it comes to the Electoral College. While the debate — the first of three between the Trump and the former vice president — will shed light on the policy and ideological differences between these two men, there will be virtually no questions regarding religion.

Pew Research put together a wonderful list of facts recently about Catholic voters in this country. It’s a resource journalists need to bookmark and filled with data that should be included in news stories, but rarely is these days. Biden is seeking to become just the second Roman Catholic president in U.S. history after John F. Kennedy in 1960.

While Catholics backed JFK 50 years ago, there is been a seismic shift in recent decades.

The various kinds of “Catholic voters” (click here for GetReligion post on that term) are a big deal in this election cycle for both Trump and Biden.

The president has already harnessed the power of four Catholics groups to help him win reelection. The former vice president, meanwhile, is trying to attract them after naming three dozen “Catholics for Biden” co-chairs. Aside from what the campaigns out out, journalists need to be on the lookout for other resources on what questions are relevant for these voters, this time around.


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