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We have entered a quiet stage in the VeggieTales/Madonna wars involving what religious believers can and cannot say on NBC. I have held off for a couple of days since the last update in order to watch for developments in this story and, sure enough, we had some more over the weekend.
Well, friends, I am back from my honeymoon. I have declared it the Best Honeymoon in the History of the World — but I don’t have much to compare it to. Tanned, rested and ready, I am. And married. And operating under a new name. So many changes.
The apparent destruction of the presidential ambitions of Sen. George Allen, R-Va., has been interesting to watch. The story goes several layers deep, and I’ll do my best to probe the more interesting, religion-oriented ones in this post. Feel free to post your thoughts on how religion was played in the hundreds of articles written on the politician who has been dubbed the darling of the religious right and a clone of President Bush.
Peter Wallsten of the Los Angeles Times had a revealing article in Saturday’s paper about a Washington conference sponsored by the Family Research Council. During the conference, conservative evangelicals talked about the importance of the November elections and said if Republicans are not elected, the country will go down the toilet. Well, they didn’t say Republicans, but they did encourage people to support candidates who understand their values.
I think it’s time to say this again: We have entered the age in which many reporters and their sources are going to have to record interviews that are linked to complicated and/or controversial stories.
The latest scuttlebutt on the 2008 presidential hopes of Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has him cozying up to President Bush on the torture and interrogation of terrorists. And it’s all in an attempt to differentiate himself from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has been fighting Bush tooth and nail on the issue.
As we recently demonstrated, your friends here at GetReligion admire the work of the young Jon Meacham at Newsweek. At least, we admire his skills as an essay writer whose editorial point of view would be right at home at Episcopal News Service.
Let me pause to plug an item or two over at Rod “Crunchy Con” Dreher’s blog, in large part because he has veered totally into GetReligion territory with repeated appeals for journalists to actually cover the doctrinal contents of the current story about Pope Benedict XVI and Islam.
