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Bob Casey Jr. must be really irritated with father-son comparisons by now. In 1992, the Democratic Party denied a speaking slot to his father, then-Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey Sr., at the national convention. Casey Jr. spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention but merely mentioned his “honest disagreement” with President Obama on abortion.
Having spent part of the 1990s covering Colorado’s controversial gay rights limitation measure Amendment 2 (which was passed by voters but declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court), I know there are always more than two sides to these debates. That’s part of what makes a recent Washington Post story so intriguing.
Steve already looked at some of the media coverage of the story about Switzerland banning the construction of minarets on mosques. For those of us accustomed to First Amendment-protected religious freedom, the vote probably comes as a shock and disappointment. Nairobi reader William Black wrote about a couple of the problems he saw in the coverage. He was disappointed with the vote saying that, as a Christian, he sees no reason to fear Muslim voices in the marketplace of ideas or Muslim presence in his neighborhood. And he worried that this vote would set a dangerous precedent for limiting the freedom of other religious groups in Europe.
The little movie that could, otherwise known at “The Blind Side,” is starting to cause some tremors out on the left coast.
Gaurdian reporter Chris McGreal has written a subtle and finely nuanced piece headlined “Religious right launches fresh assault on US abortion rights.”
Every year we read about the War on Christmas. The mainstream media love to cover stories about those Scrooges who ban the use of any specific greetings related to Christmas and the old curmudgeons who complain about the same.
<a href=It’s odd to see some of your former classmates quoted in The New York Times as if they are newsworthy. Don’t get me wrong–many of them are doing cool and interesting things. Samuel G. Freedman profiles one of these classmates in a nice, upbeat story to show how young evangelicals are taking up interests in climate change, AIDS and poverty in his On Religion column for the Times.
I suppose if there’s a dark underside to being a sports fan it’s that it allows us to indulge our capacity for irrational hatred. It’s a really disconcerting thing when you stop to think about it.
The Washington Post has a feature headlined “A muscular, die-hard spirituality: Self-sufficient Christians prepare for Second Coming or for life after global disaster.” So you can imagine that I expected the story to be about that.
