Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Following the murder of prominent late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, gunned down in the foyer of his church, many mainstream media outlets have run articles about the controversial practice of late-term abortions and the doctors who perform them. This is a good thing. On a public policy issue as heated as late-term abortion, it’s good to provide readers with more information about the practice and who is involved.
A couple of days ago, President Barack Obama conducted a few interviews in anticipation of his upcoming speech to Muslims. In one of the interviews, he made a statement about the religious make-up of the United States of America. Here’s how the New York Times wrote it up:
Following on Doug’s questions about differences in media coverage of the murders of Dr. George Tiller and Army recruiter Pvt. William Long, it’s been interesting to see how different political groups are talking about the two murders.
For a while I was complaining that the mainstream media hadn’t really covered how the clash over same-sex marriage affected religious groups. So in that regard, I’m pleased to see this story by the Washington Post‘s Karl Vick about how some supporters of same-sex marriage are engaged in, to put it in the most charitable way I can, a public relations campaign against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The story, headlined “‘The Mormons are Coming!’” has some major-league weaknesses, however:
This week the California State Supreme Court revealed its decision regarding Proposition 8, the ballot initiative limiting marriage to a union of one man and one woman. Californians had passed the initiative and opponents had filed suit against it. The court arguments were televised which meant that no one was particularly surprised by the ruling, which the Washington Post‘s Keith Richburg writes up here:
Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been around for a number of days. I have been busy giving birth to my second child, L.K., and adjusting to the craziness that is wrangling multiple children. The vitals for that birthday on the 12th were 8 lbs, 3 ounces (the exact birth weight of her mama) and 19 inches long. The baptism will be this Sunday, Pentecost, at our church.
So Sunday was Mother’s Day. I hope you all bought your mothers flowers and wrote her a nice poem or something. As is tradition in my family, I did pretty much nothing for my amazing mom other than call her. Mother’s Day is not on the liturgical calendar of my church although I think it’s probably marked more by most American religious institutions than Cantate, which is what Lutherans noted today.
If you do a Google News search on the phrase “abstinence only,” you get hundreds of results and most of them are for one of two stories. There’s the media coverage of teen mother Bristol Palin and her promotion of abstinence as the only completely effective way to avoid teen pregnancy. And there’s the media coverage of the news that President Obama has removed hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for abstinence-focused programs.
