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On Saturday, thousands of opponents of the current health care legislation showed up at the Capitol where they expressed concern with various parts of the bill. I was able to observe many hours of the protest and some of the proceedings inside. But I thought it interesting that the very first protester I saw getting off at the Metro stop nearest to the Capitol was a nun in habit.
I have a friend who has been on the health care beat for her paper for years. I saw her last week at a party and she looked a bit weary. I gave her my own views on the matter and she replied, in all sincerity, “I just want it to be over.” It is very difficult to be a journalist covering this thing. It’s hardly the most transparent thing to have been debated in Congress, it has about a million moving parts, special interests are fighting for last-minute inclusions or exclusions, and the legislative machinations are confusing for all but the most nerdy of parliamentarians.
In his thought-provoking essay “Reclaiming St. Patrick’s Day,” Christianity Today‘s Ted Olsen talks about how Christians could emphasize the day by highlighting issues related to the great saint (e.g. fighting human trafficking, celebrating multi-ethnic communities and incarnational ministry). Here’s how it begins:
Apparently I wasn’t the only Washington Post reader who thought the paper’s coverage of same-sex marriage last week was a bit lopsided. I noticed one of the reader questions posed in an on-line chat to the Post‘s Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli mentioned it as well:
Last week, Sarah looked at media coverage of Jihad Jane, the Pennsylvania woman who was arrested in a terrorism plot case. And now we learn of Jihad Jamie, another American woman involved in the same alleged plot. The early coverage of Jane left unanswered major questions about how she converted to Islam. Let’s look at the coverage of Jamie Paulin-Ramirez.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Times told us that Christian conservatives and the tea party movement were getting cozy. The same day, Politico told us that evangelicals “fear” the tea partiers. (We looked at those two stories here.)
I was reading this Washington Post story about how “some” Muslims don’t want to fill out U.S. Census forms for fear of how the federal government will use that information.
Either the religious right is cozying up to the “tea party” movement or it fears it. Depending which story you read, that is. The first article to hit our mailboxes this morning was the Los Angeles Times. “Social conservatives put religious twist on ‘tea party’ message” says that activists are working together based on a shared concern over growing government.
This week we’ve seen two major stories on “gendercide.” That’s the phenomenon of some 100 million plus females having been aborted through sex selective abortion. One appears in the Christian Science Monitor and the other in The Economist.
