Julia Duin

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Gov. Jerry Brown's Catholicity vs. euthanasia decision gets above-the-fold ink

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Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old Californian who moved to Oregon last year so she could end her life instead of facing the last stages of brain cancer, got her political revenge this week.

That's the reality in the news coverage. That’s because -- unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere -- California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill making assisted suicide legal. Which opened the gates to this controversial personal or family choice to some 38 million people overnight.

And the Los Angeles Times reporter who covered it did a great job of making the religion angle front and center. That is, the Catholic governor of the country’s most populous state did something totally against his religion, but readers got to learn about how that decision played out. Start reading here:

Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, signed a measure Monday allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.
Brown appeared to struggle in deciding whether to approve the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church.
“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown wrote in a signing message. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”

After explaining some provisions of the End of Life Option Act and placing a quote by its opponents quite high in the story, the reporter swung back to Brown, who said he had weighed the religious arguments.


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Beleagured Jehovah's Witnesses in South Korea get sympathetic treatment in New York Times

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Jehovah’s Witnesses are notoriously tough to interview.

They didn’t used to be. Back in the late 1980s while I was on the religion beat at the Houston Chronicle, I arranged for myself and a photographer to follow a team work its way, door by door, through a certain posh neighborhood. Other than the fact they tried to convert me and we got into an argument as to whether Easter should be a Christian festival, it was an enlightening time. I was amazed at how rude people were to these visitors and how many doors were literally slammed in their faces.

But in 2012, when I assigned students in my religion journalism class at the University of Maryland to find a JW team to follow around, I learned that no Witnesses could talk with us now unless their New York headquarters allowed them to. And I could never get anyone from New York to answer my calls.

Which is why this New York Times story of the horrors that Witnesses face when refusing military service in South Korea was a real coup.

No doubt the Witnesses over there talked because they wanted to get word out about how bad things truly are in the Land of the Morning Calm. When reading this story, just take into account that it's unusual to get Witnesses to cooperate much with the media. The article starts out with:

SEOUL, South Korea -- Since he was a teenager, Kim Min-hwan knew he would have to make a choice: abandon his religious convictions or go to prison.


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The Los Angeles Times omits a key (ghost!) detail in John Roberts retrospective

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One odd innovation during the most recent GOP presidential candidates debate was how many candidates trashed Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Wasn’t he the savior for all conservatives some 10 years ago? Didn’t he trash the recent majority ruling on same-sex marriage in June?

Which is why I was interested to read a recent Los Angeles Times story on Roberts’ fall from grace, as it were. 

Several publications ran similar 10th anniversary pieces on Roberts' ascent to the high court this past week. The chief justice, by the way, just turned 60, so his influence on the court should last at least another 20 years, if he sticks around as long as some of the current 80-something justices.

Here is a crucial section of the Los Angeles Times piece. Might there be a crucial element of his work and worldview missing?

When a divided Supreme Court handed down six major rulings in the last week of June, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. came down firmly on the conservative side in five of them.
He voted against gay marriage, in favor of weakening a federal law against racial bias in housing and for the Arizona Republicans who challenged the state’s independent panel that draws election districts. He joined 5-4 majorities to block an Obama administration clean-air rule and to uphold a state's use of substitute drugs to carry out lethal injections.
But as Roberts this week marks the 10th anniversary of becoming chief ustice, he finds himself in the cross hairs of right-leaning pundits and GOP presidential hopefuls who brand him a disappointment and openly question his conservative credentials because of the one case of the six in which he voted with the court’s liberals.


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Seattle Weekly uses Falun Gong as counterweight to Chinese President Xi

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While Pope Francis was leading a star-studded tour of three East Coast cities last week, there was another international visitor heading for Washington, D.C. -- Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Clearly, Francis won out in the media coverage sweepstakes. Bloomberg may have had the best headline about the junction of the two: (“China’s Xi Can’t Compete with ‘Rock Star’ Pope in U.S. Trip”).

However, if you happen to live in the Seattle area, Xi’s visit was a bit hard to miss, because that’s where he spent two days before heading off to DC.

While Xi was ferried from Everett to Tacoma with stops at Redmond’s Microsoft campus and business meetings in downtown Seattle, whole interstates were closed for his 130-car motorcades for his 1,000-person entourage. Last Tuesday, his arrival caused a 17-mile-long backup on I-5 south going into Seattle and his Thursday departure caused similar headaches. The area around Xi’s hotel (the Westin) in downtown Seattle was a no-go zone for ordinary folks, but protestors got as close as they could.

And the religion angle? One was a Falun Gong practitioner who’d been tortured for years in Chinese gulags. A Seattle Weekly reporter happened to find her .


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GLAAD enlists mainstream press in campaign promoting gay-friendly pope stories

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We’re halfway through Pope Francis’ visit to three East Coast cities and there’s been a flood of news about the pontiff’s meeting with President Obama, his appearance on the White House’s South Lawn, his canonization Mass at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and his Thursday morning speech to Congress on that brought up illegal immigration, redistribution of income, the death penalty and climate change.  There were less-publicized actions, such as his visit to the Little Sisters of the Poor. There were the gestures that were intended to make a point in favor of the disposessed; the visit to Catholic Charities, the blessing of the girl in the wheelchair at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and even a blessing for Sandra Lee, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s longtime partner who has been fighting breast cancer.

Who knows what Francis may have up his sleeve for the World Meeting of Families this weekend in Philadelphia, but one thing he’s steered clear of so far is anything explicitly dealing with gay marriage, or just gay issues.

However, that’s not from the lack of trying by GLAAD, the homosexual advocacy group that that “rewrites the script for LGBT acceptance,” according to its site. Most informative is GLAAD's new resource guide: “The Papal Visit: A Journalist’s Guide to Reporting on Pope Francis and the LGBT Community.” Here are some of the “best practices” they advise journalists to take up:   

Give voice to the unheard: Perhaps the impact of the Pope’s words on LGBT issues is most directly felt by those who are Catholic and LGBT. Often, news coverage focuses on pundits or hierarchy, without including the voices of those who are most affected. Hearing from everyday LGBT-identified people is critically important. Offering these perspectives presents a more accurate representation of the attitudes that exist within Catholic congregations…


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Los Angeles Times wades into latest SoCal thicket on campus political speech

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California has been one of flashpoints in political-correctness-on-campus controversies for many years. One that made it to the US Supreme Court was Christian Legal Society v. Hastings,  a 2009 case that ruled against a CLS chapter at the University of California/Hastings that required its leaders to live according to the chapter’s core religious beliefs. One of those beliefs was a prohibition against extramarital sex; a stricture that gay students found offensive, hence the lawsuit. We covered that here and here.

Another was a flap at UC Irvine where a group of Muslim student protesters in 2010 disrupted a speech by the Israeli ambassador. Others objected to the punishment meted out to those students. And earlier this year, several student government leaders at UCLA questioned a Jewish student’s eligibility for a campus judicial panel on the grounds that she could not be expected to be impartial. Also this year, the UC Irvine student government voted to ban all flags – including the American flag – from a section of campus.

Thus, it wasn’t a big surprise to read the next salvo in this war in the Los Angeles Times:

On the eve of what is expected to be a contentious debate over a proposed new UC policy statement on bias and free speech, the head of the UC regents board defended what are called “principles against intolerance" on Wednesday.


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How aggregating: The Atlantic goes halfway in reporting on Anglican primates meeting

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I’ve been happy to see more religion pieces in The Atlantic in recent years, as such coverage was not occurring in that publication during my 16 years in Washington, D.C. I’m not sure what led to a change in heart among editors there, but it’s nice to see articles like last week’s piece on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s last-ditch attempt to hold the Anglican Communion together. That’s the good part.

The bad part is the piece is aggregated, in that it’s a patchwork of quotes from three British media outlets along with segments from the archbishop’s press release about a gathering of Anglican primates in January 2016. And there were some gaping holes. The article starts thus:

Justin Welby was named archbishop of Canterbury with high hopes that he was the man who could save the Anglican Communion. Now it appears he may oversee its breakup—a calculated destruction intended, paradoxically, to save it.


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Business Insider actually likes news stories about Scientology, religion and, yes, business

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I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find an unlikely source for religion news: Business Insider, a 6-year-old web site founded by former – and disgraced -- Wall Street research analyst Henry Blodget, who is its CEO and editor-in-chief.

The site covers celebrity news, technology and all kinds of business out of New York. We have previously reported on some of their work. Some of their content is aggregated from elsewhere but they also do original reporting and commentary. Recently, that’s included everything from President Barack Obama’s tweet in favor of the Muslim youth arrested in Irving, Texas, because he brought an object to school that supposedly looked like a bomb to the decline of organized religion in America.

But its specialty is a alternative religion that is very tough for any journalist to cover: Scientology. Business Insider gave a lot of PR to “Going Clear,” the HBO film (that premiered March 29) about Scientology and is still doing follow-ups. A recent sample:

As director Alex Gibney prepares for the release of his latest movie, “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine,” it’s hard to pass up a chance to talk to the Oscar winner about his other recent film, the HBO Scientology documentary “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.”
At a recent screening of his Steve Jobs doc, Business Insider spoke with Gibney and asked him if he’s dealt with the same harassment by members of the Church of Scientology that former members of the church shown in the film say they have received.


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Surprise? Non-alcohol-serving Muslim flight attendant gets respectful media treatment

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With all the coverage of the embattled Rowan County, Ky.  clerk recently released from jail after she refused to process same-sex marriages, it was inevitable that we would be hearing about protests from similar protagonists.

There are all sorts of people of faith caught in sticky employment situations where what they’re being asked to do is not precisely what they signed up for when they accepted the job.

As GetReligion has reported quite recently, reporters have had problems getting the facts right plus the degree of snark and outright hostility towards people such as Kim Davis has, at times, been so over the top. Our own Terry Mattingly passed along M.Z. "GetReligionista emeritus" Hemingway's bold use of term “slut-shaming” to describe it.

And so, what happens when someone from a different faith entirely makes a similar argument? Does that change the journalistic equation? Here’s what the Huffington Post said about a Muslim flight attendant suspended for not serving alcoholic beverages:


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