Discrimination

Finding religion ghosts in the Ivy League wars, with help (sort of) from Andrew Sullivan

Finding religion ghosts in the Ivy League wars, with help (sort of) from Andrew Sullivan

If you have been following the horror shows at Ivy League schools, you know how agonizing this situation has become for old-school First Amendment liberals.

Are the tropes of anti-Semitism still protected forms of speech? Back in the 1970s, ACLU lawyers knew the painful answer to that question when Nazis wanted to legally march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago-area community containing many Holocaust survivors.

America has come a long way, since then. Today, the illiberal world considers a stunning amount of free speech to be violence, except in myriad cases in which speech controls are used to prevent “hate speech” and misinformation/disinformation in debates when one side controls the public space in which free debates are supposed to be taking place.

Clearly, death threats, physical intimidation and assaults are out of line. But what about a slogan such as, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”? Is that automatically a call for genocide? The Associated Press has this to say:

Many Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction.

Ah, but what does Hamas say? The same AP report notes:

“Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north,” Khaled Mashaal, the group’s former leader, said that year [2012] in a speech in Gaza celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas. “There will be no concession on any inch of the land.”

The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter.

The key is that Hamas opposes a two-state solution allowing Israel to continue as a Jewish homeland. How is Israel eliminated without the eliminating, to one degree or another, millions of Jews?

This brings us back to the Ivy League. At this point, I think that it’s time for someone to ask if other minorities on Ivy League campuses have — in recent decades — experienced severe limitations on their free speech and freedom of association. To what degree are other minorities “ghosts” on these campuses? Do they barely exist? Has the rush to “diversity” eliminated many religious and cultural points of view?

Ah, but the Ivy League giants are private schools. They have rights of their own.


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Why editors in legacy newsrooms struggle with calling members of Hamas 'terrorists'

Why editors in legacy newsrooms struggle with calling members of Hamas 'terrorists'

It’s been a little more than a week since Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli civilians, killing more than 1,300 people. Many of those killed were children, some even babies, on the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.

Since then, the situation in that part of the world has become a full-blown war. Israel has responded by attacking Gaza, with Hamas leaders (and even hostages) mixed among civilians who, in some cases, have been prevented from evacuating by Hamas.

Palestinians now face a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions.

Not surprisingly, many in the elite media have gotten — and continue to get — this story wrong. For too many years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was treated like a political story. It was a story about land. It was about colonization. It was about human rights.

It may be about all those things, depending on whom you ask, but it’s also a story about about Jews. It’s about Muslims. It’s about sacred sites in the Holy Lands.

In other words, it’s a religion story.

As someone who covered the 9/11 attacks and the years that followed, I am well versed and experienced when it comes to news about terrorism. I know what terrorism looks like when I see it. So do most reporters and editors.

However, not everyone seems to have open eyes these days.

Let’s start with the BBC, one of the biggest and most influential news organizations in the world. The British state broadcaster came under pressure last week when its leaders refused to call Hamas terrorists. In an explanation posted to the BBC website on Oct. 11, John Simpson, who serves as World Affairs editor, defended the decision this way:

Government ministers, newspaper columnists, ordinary people — they're all asking why the BBC doesn't say the Hamas gunmen who carried out appalling atrocities in southern Israel are terrorists.

The answer goes right back to the BBC's founding principles.


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What's the news impact of the intense racism investigation at Wheaton College?

What's the news impact of the intense racism investigation at Wheaton College?

History matters with everything touching upon morality and religion. And so it is with the dramatic racial reckoning in a candid and thorough self-examination released Sept. 14 by Wheaton College in Illinois.

The implications command news media attention because the 163-year-old school is among the most highly influential and respected institutions in U.S. evangelical Protestantism. This is, after all, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham.

By coincidence, the power of history was underscored the very next day at an emotional worship service to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the racist terror bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls ages 11 to 14 as they donned Sunday choir robes. Perhaps more than any other episode of the civil rights era, this eroded white southern churchgoers’ remaining tolerance toward Jim Crow segregation.

History is “our best teacher,” said the service’s keynote speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (video here starting at 1:30), who quoted I Corinthians 15:10 and Hebrews 11:1 and said “with God’s grace” ongoing racial justice efforts will succeed. Though “parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about” and “difficult to remember and re-live,” she said, “it is dangerous to forget them.”

Precisely for that reason, Wheaton’s Historical Review Task Force, recommended by President Philip Ryken and approved by its Board of Trustees, began investigating past campus race relations in October, 2021. The result is the 122-page accounting that the trustees endorsed and issued last week (click here for text).

The report is important because, as the student newspaper reported, “Wheaton is one of the first Christian colleges to conduct such a review” of the sort seen at some non-religious campuses. One notable predecessor was the 2018 report (document here) on the racial history of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a school that’s one year older than Wheaton.

The task force, made up of trustee, faculty, administration, student and alumni representatives, declared, “We repent of all forms of racism and favoritism in our institutional history, whether conscious or unconscious” and pledged follow-up actions.

The first big example is the trustees’ decision to immediately remove from the library the name that honored J. Oliver Buswell Jr., in response to long-running student protests.


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How will religion fare as liberal arts education shrinks in the United States of America?

How will religion fare as liberal arts education shrinks in the United States of America?

Pity U.S. colleges coping with political feuds, “diversity,” declining applications and enrollments, student debt and tight budgets.

Add religious and moral issues and things get even more complex.

Some religious colleges are on survival watch. On June 29, the 140-year-old Alliance University (formerly Nyack College) decided it must shut down, and a second New York City Christian school, The King’s College, will also close unless there’s a last-minute reprieve. Early in the week, Religion News Service reported:

The last remaining evangelical Christian college in New York City, The King’s College, announced Monday (July 17) in an email that the school, which has faced dire financial challenges, would not offer classes in the fall. In an earlier meeting with faculty and staff it was announced that many teaching contracts would not renew or were canceled.

“This decision comes after months of diligently exploring numerous avenues to enable the College to continue its mission,” read the email, which was addressed to “members of the King’s community” and signed by the Board of Trustees. “In connection with this decision,” it continued, “it is with regret we share that our faculty and staff positions will be reduced or eliminated.

The running tally by www.HigherEdDive.com lists 96 colleges that have gone out of business since 2016, and Christianity Today counts 18 Christian colleges that shut down since COVID, with more likely.

Amid all those newsworthy developments, let’s not neglect the content of higher education. There’s been considerable media coverage on conservatives’ complaints over neglect of “dead white men,” liberal faculty bias, oppressive secularization, imbalance on American history, “cancel culture” and “woke” pressures.

Yet with considerably less fanfare, a different 21st Century trend is recasting the very definition of a well-educated citizen. College education as it existed in the West across the centuries was a huge invention and contribution of the Christian religion and, in turn, it enhanced value formation and spiritual depth. Any religion builds upon the past and non-technological reflection on what’s “good, true, and beautiful,” as the old formula expressed it.


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News coverage of Los Angeles Dodgers drag-nuns story reveals plenty of bad habits

News coverage of Los Angeles Dodgers drag-nuns story reveals plenty of bad habits

Sports have always brought people together. That’s a big reason that they have been so popular for decades.

But in our ever-polarized world around political lines, sports have taken a hit. Whether it involved NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem or NBA players supporting Black Lives Matter, sports and sports journalism have become increasingly political the last few years.

Baseball, and specifically the Los Angeles Dodgers, became the focus of controversy over the last two weeks when the team invited, then un-invited and then issued a welcome once again a group known as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, a well-known San Francisco group of queer and trans people dressed as nuns at the team’s annual Pride Night on June 16.

As many noted, there’s no way a sports franchise would have given this kind of salute to a group of traditional Catholics opposed by cultural progressives, a group like the Little Sisters of the Poor.

What took place during this entire saga is a series of predictable news-media coverage twists and turns guided by professionals who, it appears, saw this issue from their own left-right vantage points. Modern journalism is often criticized for building narratives and reading minds rather than reporting facts and interviewing both sides. This story fit that mold.

While the news coverage lacked voices from both sides in this debate, most of the reports also lacked another very important term — anti-Catholic.

Are these “nuns” anti-Catholic? It certainly depends on which side of this debate you are on and many news outlets made that clear and, thus, ignored citizens whose views were found to be heretical, in terms of current newsroom dogmas.

Take, for example, the Los Angeles Times feature that ran on May 25 that included a photo shoot with the “nuns.” Here’s how that piece opened:

Ask the L.A. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence why they decided to join the order of drag nuns, and most of them will tell you it’s because they felt the call.

Sister Tootie Toot (glitter green lips, dark beard, emerald cocktail dress) felt it like a ton of bricks when she walked into a leather bar where several sisters had assembled.


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FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage?

FBI war on 'rad trad' Catholics: Where's the outrage (or even fairness) in press coverage?

There are several factors that, when put together, make an event or trend a news story. 

The first is that it is new. It’s not a coincidence that the first three letters of the word news helps to form the word “new.”

Then there’s timing. Not just “what,” but also “when” something happens makes it newsworthy. “What” and “when” are essential to the five W’s (which also includes “where,” “who” and “why”) that reporters and editors worry most when determining news coverage.

The inability for certain types of stories to register with the secular press, especially legacy media, is yet another sign of the political, cultural and moral divisions in our society and the dying American model of the press. 

While this space is very much dedicated to critiquing news coverage of Catholic issues and those involving Catholics, it is very difficult to do so when there is little to no coverage of important Catholic stories by a very sizable chunk of the American media ecosystem. 

This takes us to a trio of stories involving the federal government and the Catholic church that took place during the first half of this month. At a time of year where the mainstream media is seeking Christian storylines to coincide with Lent, Holy Week and Easter Sunday (beyond photos of elaborate hats), the three stories I am about to dissect here drew very little mainstream media attention.

Instead, it was the Catholic press (once again!) and “conservative” secular media that did the bulk of the reporting on, for my first example, the issue regarding the decision by Walter Reed Hospital to drop a contract for Franciscan priests to provide pastoral care of patients and, instead, hiring a secular firm to oversee those same services going forward. Try to imagine “secular” Last Rites for Catholics?

The second was the decision by the Department of Justice to recommend zero jail time in a plea deal involving a suspect charged with destruction of property at a Catholic church in Washington last year.

Finally, there were, according to documents, traditional Catholics who were targeted by the FBI because they could be considered domestic terrorists.


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Mainstream outlets ignore anti-Catholic angles in Merrick Garland's Senate testimony

Mainstream outlets ignore anti-Catholic angles in Merrick Garland's Senate testimony

It’s almost always news when a public official testifies before a congressional committee. Such was the case when Attorney General Merrick Garland faced the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

As expected, it was an important, and often heated, four hours of testimony that was highlighted by the back-and-forth exchanges between Garland and Republican senators on the panel. You can read Garland’s opening remarks on the DOJ website. 

Beyond his prepared remarks, there were plenty of potential storylines tied to religion that surfaced in the hearing. However, depending on which news organizations one follows, these storylines either made it into the news coverage or they were never mentioned. 

The Garland hearing comes at a time of heightened polarization, something made worse by the Supreme Court decision that rolled back the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. The aftermath of that decision has resulted in increased vandalism of Catholic churches, pro-life pregnancy centers and even a now-retracted FBI memo that targeted some traditional Catholics

The content of the coverage of the questions asked and the contents of Garland’s responses depended on what reporters, editors and news organizations deemed important. This has been the case for decades, but the shift has changed dramatically in more recent years as news organizations divide themselves into political camps depending on the beliefs of their faithful audiences

Did valid religion angles, especially those involving Catholics, make it into the coverage of national legacy media outlets? 

Here is a hint: Prayers by protestors at abortion facilities appear to be considered much more dangerous, and thus newsworthy, than vandalism, or even arson, at Catholic churches and crisis pregnancy centers. News coverage of this Senate hearing seemed to have been produced by journalists living in parallel universes. Once again, this is the dominant news trend in the Internet age.

Here is the top of the New York Times report on the Garland hearing: 

WASHINGTON — Republicans subjected Attorney General Merrick B. Garland to a four-hour grilling before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, a harbinger of the fights that loom ahead as the party targets the Justice Department in the months leading up to the 2024 election. 


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Why you probably missed news about the FBI memo calling out 'radical traditionalist' Catholics

Why you probably missed news about the FBI memo calling out 'radical traditionalist' Catholics

The politicization of American society has affected a great number of institutions — from universities to major sports leagues to large corporations. Right now, there are a great many things that divide us as Americans.

The FBI has also become politicized. This is a belief that picked up momentum during Donald Trump’s presidency, but continues to exist now under the Joe Biden administration. If journalism is the place that you believe should shed a light on this painful paradox, then you’d be sadly mistaken.

Not only has the FBI possibly been politicized, but so has journalism, and we’re all poorer for it. A great example of this journalistic disconnect is an important story that “conservative” and “religious” media covered, while it was ignored by the vast majority of mainstream news outlets, including our culture’s most elite and powerful newsrooms.

The key question: Has the FBI decided that “radical” Catholics are dangerous and a threat to American public life?

On Feb. 8, a website called UncoveredDC reported on an FBI document titled “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

UncoveredDC says on its website that it pledges “to work hard to bring you the unvarnished truth, a concept the legacy media abandoned long ago.” It is considered a right-wing news website given the people it covers and the angles it takes on stories. That doesn’t mean that what they are reporting on isn’t true, especially if it comes on the form of official government documents.

The memo, out of the FBI’s Richmond, Va. field office, zeroed in on what it called “Radical-Traditionalist Catholics.” The memo notes that FBI investigations have found that there is a “growing overlap” between white nationalists and the RTCs. The Jan. 23 memo claimed that RTCs are a small minority within Catholicism. It said that they adhere to beliefs that are “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT” and linked to “white supremacy.”

That sounds like a big story, especially with a rosary-carrying Catholic in the White House, even if he is a Catholic who has — in word and deed — rejected some ancient doctrines of the church.

Why was this story not covered by most news outlets?


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Podcast: Is Colorado Springs covered by a 'fundamentalist' blanket of hate?

Podcast: Is Colorado Springs covered by a 'fundamentalist' blanket of hate?

At this point, there are many, many crucial facts that journalists do not know about the horrible Club Q massacre in Colorado Springs.

This lack of facts has done little to shape the coverage. We do not, for example, know if Mx. Anderson Aldrich is sincere when claiming, in case documents, to be nonbinary. It will, in the meantime, be interesting to see if many mainstream newsrooms choose to deadname Aldrich in their coverage, perhaps by striving to avoid pronouns altogether.

We do know that the alleged shooter was raised in a broken home with multiple mental-health and violence issues. Consider, for example, the father — an ex-con MMA fighter turned porn star (and a Republican, of one form or another).

At this point, it does appear that some journalists — while searching for the “why” in the “who, what, when, where, why and how” formula — have decided to place the city of Colorado Springs on trial and, perhaps, the whole state of Colorado. This was the primary topic discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

The key: A return of that dreaded journalism F-word — “fundamentalist.” For more background on this religion-beat disease, please see this GetReligion post by Richard Ostling (“What is 'Fundamentalism'? Name 666 or so examples from recent news coverage”) and this On Religion column (“Define ‘fundamentalist,’ please”) that I wrote in 2011.

Here is the key material from a USA Today story that, in my opinion, goes completely over the top while claiming that, to be blunt, a kind of hate cloud covers Colorado Springs. The headline: “Colorado Springs worked to change its anti-gay image — then its sole LGBTQ nightclub was targeted.”

Most notably, in 1992, religious fundamentalists from Colorado Springs wrote Amendment 2, a measure seeking to amend Colorado's constitution by making it illegal to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation. The measure was approved by Colorado voters that November, earning Colorado the nickname of the "Hate State," according to the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum. Amendment 2 was ultimately struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.

The city is also the headquarters of Focus on the Family, a fundamentalist Protestant organization whose founder James Dobson is known for his stances against gay and trans rights.


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