LGBTQ

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Brownback has critics and supporters: All these voices matter when covering religious freedom debates

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If you have followed news about the many, many clashes between the emerging doctrines of sexual liberty and the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion clause, you know this isn't a tidy, simple story with two sides and that's that.

Coverage of Sam Brownback's nomination to a key global religious freedom post is the latest fight.

Yes, there are LGBTQ activists in these debates and there are cultural conservatives. But there are also economic and libertarian conservatives who embrace gay-rights arguments and old-style liberals (Andrew Sullivan leaps to mind) who back gay rights and the defense of religious liberty, free speech and the freedom of association. There are Catholics on both sides. There are self-identified evangelicals on both sides.

In the mainstream press, this conflict has put extra pressure on journalists, with some striving to accurately and fairly cover voices on all sides, while others have thrown in the editorial towel and embraced open advocacy in their coverage. BuzzFeed remains the most candid newsroom on this front, with its "News Standards and Ethics Guide" that states:

We firmly believe that for a number of issues, including civil rights, women's rights, anti-racism, and LGBT equality, there are not two sides.

Leaders at the New York Times have not been that candid, at least while in power. There was, of course, that 2011 talk by former editor Bill Keller (days after he retired) in which he said America's most powerful newsroom never slants its news coverage "aside from" issues -- such as gay rights -- that were part of the "liberal values, sort of social values thing" that went with the Times being a "tolerant, urban" institution.

Is this "Kellerism" ethic, or doctrine, still being used? Let's take a look at a key chunk of a recent Times news story that ran with this headline: "In One Day, Trump Administration Lands 3 Punches Against Gay Rights." The overture paints the big picture:

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration abruptly waded into the culture wars over gay rights this week, signaling in three separate actions that it will use the powers of the federal government to roll back civil rights for gay and transgender people.


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Are Christian conservatives the new media bogeymen for all Donald Trump policies?

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I was in Washington, D.C., this past week on a journalism assignment that put me, as a reporter, in touch with a lot of Christian conservatives.

Naturally, I was curious as to whether any of these people had anything to do with President Donald Trump’s transgender announcement. The ones I talked with denied they had.

I was aware of other issues they were discussing, so I believed their assertion that transgender issues weren’t on their list, much less near the top. So I found it odd that these same conservatives were blamed for Trump’s announcement in some news reports.

Here’s what the Associated Press led with. Note that the headline on this piece said, “Trump transgender ban nod to Christian conservatives,” not just “conservatives."

WASHINGTON (AP) -- His agenda stalled and his party divided, President Donald Trump veered into the nation’s simmering culture wars by announcing plans to ban transgender people from serving in the military.
Much of the political world -- prominent conservatives and Trump administration officials, among them -- was surprised and confused by the president’s sudden social media pronouncement. But on the ground in North Carolina, Tami Fitzgerald was elated.
“It was pretty high up on our wish list,” said Fitzgerald, executive director for North Carolina Values Coalition, which has fought for that state’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Fitzgerald said she found it “ridiculous” that the American taxpayers were being forced to pay for treatment and surgery that violates the conscience of most of the American public.”
Trump’s abrupt announcement amounted to a direct political lifeline to his most passionate supporters. In his chaotic first six months in office, Trump has lost sizable support from independents and some Republican voters. But polls show white evangelicals remaining loyal -- and essential to stabilizing his political standing.


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There they go again: Digital gods at Facebook zap some big Catholic pages (news media yawn)

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Every now and then, the principalities and powers at Facebook do something that ticks off lots of religious people, usually morally and doctrinally conservative people.

Most of the time, Facebook leaders issue a kind of "the technology made us do it" apology and life rolls on -- until the next time. In most cases, these alleged Facebook sins are treated as "conservative news," with coverage at Fox News and various alternative, religious news sources online. Something like this.

The GetReligion "mirror image" question, as always, is this: How much media attention would these news stories have received if Facebook folks had shut down lots of pages belonging to LGBTQ groups (or Muslims, or environmentalists, or #BlackLivesMatter networks). I know this is hard to imagine, but please try.

So this time, a bunch of Catholic websites were taken down. Here is the entire Associated Press report on this, at least as it appeared at ABC News, The Washington Post, The New York Times, etc.

Facebook is blaming a technical glitch for knocking several Catholic-focused Facebook pages with millions of followers offline for more than a day.
Catholic radio network Relevant Radio says on its website that its "Father Rocky" Facebook page went down on Monday and wasn't restored until late Tuesday night. It says more than 20 other prominent Catholic pages were also suspended.
The shutdown prompted speculation among some page administrators that they were being intentionally censored.
A Facebook spokesperson apologized for the disruption Wednesday, telling The Associated Press in a statement that all pages have been restored. Facebook says the incident "was triggered accidentally by a spam detection tool."

My favorite detail missing from that little story is that one of the sites knocked offline was the "Papa Francisco Brazil" page dedicated to the life and work of Pope Francis.

Now there's a nice headline, for those included to write it: Facebook zaps Pope Francis page in Brazil.


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Wait just a minute: Fading Lutherans (ELCA) in Waco sold their lovely building to Anglicans?

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I think leaders of The Waco Tribune-Herald team had an interesting religion-beat story on their hands the other day, but it appears that they may not have known that.

It's easy to see the some predictable news trends looming over the recent headline: "Dwindling congregation forces sale of 133-year-old Waco Lutheran church."

There are several valid news angles here, the first of which is that lots of fading urban churches are being squeezed by similar financial and demographic issues. You can see that in this recent story from The Nashville Tennessean that was picked up for further distribution by Religion News Service.

If you visit the core streets and neighborhoods of almost any American city you will find lots of churches -- often from the old "Seven Sisters" flocks of liberal mainline Protestantism -- sitting on what is now prime real estate for re-developers appealing to the gentrification and young singles Millennial crowds. Many of these churches now face a tornado of red statistics, with aging members, low birthrates and declining numbers of converts.

Yes, there are doctrinal issues linked to some of those issues, especially in the American heartland and Bible Belt (think Waco, Texas). However, the Tribune-Herald team isn't very interested in these issues.

Hold that thought, while we look at some summary material near the top of this report. The symbolic voice is that of 94-year-old church member Joyce Heckmann:

Through the years, there were countless Christmas celebrations, church-wide smorgasbord dinners, Sunday school classes, Vacation Bible Schools and more.
But while the years have been kind to Heckmann, they have taken their toll on the aging church building and congregation, members say. The once-vibrant church family boasted 450 members, requiring an extensive expansion project that more than doubled the size of the building in 1958.
Now, members say, they are lucky to have 40 worshipers on Sunday morning. Members recently came to the painful but practical realization that their smallish group could no longer support such a large building.
So they voted to sell the property -- Texas Historical Commission landmark medallion and all -- to Christ Church Waco, an up-and-coming Anglican congregation that has met in least 10 temporary locations since it was formed in 2009.

Now stop the train right there for a minute.


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The Independent somehow manages to quote zero Jews in news about Jewish school

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How many Jews does it take to write a newspaper story about same-sex education in private schools?

When the article is about an Orthodox Jewish school, it would be nice to have at least one.

It would be especially appropriate to quote an Orthodox Jewish scholar familiar with British laws affecting religious liberty.

The Independent ran an article on a government report that found an Orthodox Jewish girls school did not meet its standards in providing instruction to its pre-teen students on LGBT issues. The article entitled “Private Jewish school fails third Ofsted inspection for not teaching LGBT issues” is a fiasco, in terms of journalistic integrity.

It talks about and around the subject of the story, giving voice to critics, but does not speak with the subjects -- not one person who could offer an explanation why a Jewish Orthodox school might not be all that keen to conform to the cultural standards of The Independent and its left-wing readers.

The lede sets the tone for the story -- by being shown false by the second sentence of the story and setting forth The Independent’s biases.

A private, faith-based school in London has failed its third Ofsted inspection for refusing to teach its pupils about homosexuality.


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Not all evangelicals are white (true). What about Democrats who don't like religious groups?

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News consumers, I want you to flash back to the early stages of the 2016 White House race, near the start of the Donald Trump earthquake.

Remember how we had lots of headlines headlines that kept saying, "Evangelicals love Trump! Evangelicals LOVE Trump!"

Yes, that was sort of true. There were many old-guard Religious Right leaders who bonded with The Donald really early. Eventually, the vast majority of cultural and moral conservatives would vote for the sort-of-GOP standard bearer, with about half of them reluctantly doing so as a way of voting against Hillary Clinton. The mainstream press (with a few exceptions) still has not grasped the significance of that fact.

However, here is something that more reporters figured out early on, since it involved race. They discovered the crucial fact that there are black, Latino and Asian evangelicals. They realized that it was mainly WHITE evangelicals who were supporting Trump. Look at evangelicals as a whole and the picture was quite different.

This brings us to a recent Religion News Service headline about another fascinating blast of numbers from the Pew Research Center team. That headline proclaimed: "Republicans, Democrats divided on impact of religion." And here is some key information near the top:

Overall, a majority of Americans (59 percent) see religion as a positive, compared to 26 percent who say it has a negative impact on the way things are going in the U.S., according to Pew. ...
Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Republicans or those who lean Republican said churches and religious organizations have a positive impact, with 14 percent saying that impact is negative, according to Pew.
Meanwhile, Democrats are split: Half of those who are or lean Democrat believe religious institutions have a positive impact, according to the survey, while 36 percent said they have a negative impact.


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Eugene Peterson, RNS and gay marriage: Wave good-bye to clarity and objectivity

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Religion News Service definitely made headlines on July 12 when it reported that the revered author Eugene Peterson had changed his mind on same-sex marriage.

Note that I said “reported.”

The news was actually broken in an opinion piece by Jonathan Merritt, a blogger and columnist who is same-sex attracted and writes frequently on LGBTQ issues.

Merritt is passionately on the side of gays to the point where, in March, he opined that it was “good news” that reparative therapy pioneer Joe Nicolosi had died. So I don’t expect objective reporting from that quarter.

But with RNS, as we’ve said previously, the difference between news and opinion is often pretty thin. Also, it's crucial that some RNS material that is opinion -- Merritt is clearly labeled as a columnist -- may run, in some places, with a simple byline. In the online world, clear labeling of news and features is crucial. Readers are getting confused.

So Merritt, we find out later, had heard rumors that Peterson had changed his mind on gay marriage. So why not get all this on the record? The piece starts out:

When a journalist has a chance to interview a paragon of the Christian faith like Eugene Peterson, there’s a lot of pressure to pick the perfect questions. I’d asked him about why he was leaving the public eye and if he was afraid of death. I’d asked him about Donald Trump and the state of American Christianity. But there was one more topic I wanted to cover: same-sex relationships and marriage.
It’s one of the hottest topics in the church today, and given Peterson’s vast influence among both pastors and laypeople, I knew his opinion would impact the conversation. Though he has had a long career, I couldn’t find his position on the matter either online or in print. I did discover that “The Message,” Peterson’s popular paraphrase of the Bible, doesn’t use the word “homosexual” and “homosexuality” in key texts. But this wasn’t definitive proof of anything. After all, those words never appear in any English translation of the Bible until 1946.

The article then veers into a Q&A, which in my book qualifies as news.


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Hate group or hateful reporting? This is why alleged 'news organization' ABC News is under fire

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ABC News is under fire for a story in which it characterizes the Alliance Defending Freedom as "an alleged hate group."

In some ways, it's the same ole, same ole.

Click the above links, and you can read my GetReligion colleague Mark Kellner's excellent recent commentary on the Southern Poverty Law Center labeling certain conservative organizations as "hate groups." 

Kellner rightly asked: "Here's a proactive journalistic question: Does expressing one's faith and beliefs always and without exception equal hate?"

Apparently, ABC didn't get the memo. 

So we end up with this headline today:

Jeff Sessions addresses 'anti-LGBT hate group,' but DOJ won't release his remarks

And the lede:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivered a speech to an alleged hate group at an event closed to reporters on Tuesday night, but the Department of Justice is refusing to reveal what he said.
Sessions addressed members of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which was designated an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2016, at the Summit on Religious Liberty at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, in Dana Point, California.

Let's be real clear: The fact that the attorney general gave a closed-door speech is certainly a valid news topic to investigate. But at this point, can anybody really consider the SPLC a nonpartisan source when it comes to identifying hate groups?

(To be fair, NBC News had an equally horrid report.)


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It would appear first UK 'same-sex Muslim wedding' featured nice clothes and that's that

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If your GetReligionistas have said it once, we have said it a thousand times since we opened our digital doors 13 years ago: There is no one, monolithic Islam.

Thus, there is no one Muslim "Tradition," with a big-T. There is no Muslim Vatican or college of cardinals. There is no conference that speaks with one voice, like the annual gathering of the Southern Baptist Convention. There is no Islamic equivalent of the global Anglican Lambeth Conference (which, come to think of it, doesn't speak for all Anglicans these days).

With that in mind, let's ponder this: What makes a "Muslim wedding" a real Muslim wedding?

This question is not easy to answer, since in Islam weddings do not have the same kind of sacramental significance that they have, let's say, in Christianity. But two things appear to be clear and they create a kind of creative tension linked to this subject.

(1) When people talk about Islamic wedding traditions they often discuss fine details -- clothing, rituals, social events, even the amount of religious content -- linked to the culture in which the rite is taking place.

(2) In Islam, weddings have strong legal, as opposed to sacramental, implications. The key is that the rite creates a relationship that is viewed as legally binding in a Muslim community. Thus, it is a Muslim wedding.

With that in mind, consider this Time magazine headline: "This History-Making Couple Just Had One of the U.K.'s First Same-Sex Muslim Weddings." Here is the heart of this short story:

Newlyweds Jahed Choudhury and Sean Rogan are helping make history in the U.K., which legalized same-sex marriage in 2013.


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