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I guess it was about a week ago that I first saw the news that the Council on American-Islamic Relations was in some trouble with the IRS. The Investigative Project on Terrorism reported that the group was one of 275,000 to lose its tax-exempt status following three years of failure to file a Form 990.
The Associated Press ran a religion story about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ restatement and clarification on political neutrality toward candidates and parties. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, is Mormon. So are former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, both candidates for the Republican nomination for president.
A couple weeks ago, I went to the liturgy at a Greek Orthodox church in Brooklyn. One of my best friends goes there and her fiance is taking instruction there at Sts. Constantine and Helen Cathedral. My daughters will be in their wedding and they thought it might be good for them to have a refresher on what Greek services are like before the big wedding day.
I wanted to follow up on two recent GetReligion posts where I cast doubt on media reports. The first was a widely transmitted report about a Jewish court in Israel condemning a dog to death by stoning. I have a pretty good bovine excrement detector and something just smelled with the story. Of course, even people who are much less skeptical and cynical than I am probably could have figured out something was weird about the story. But you never know — crazy things happen all the time that I can’t believe. I’ve lost many a wager with my own husband about whether something actually happened (Reports of Mel Gibson’s initial rant against a police officer is one such example.).
Yesterday we looked at the bizarrely-limited-but-not-otherwise-bad coverage of the religion angles in recent debates over whether to change marriage law. I suggested in the comments to that post that some reporters were neither curious nor terribly thoughtful in how they approached the topic.
On Friday night, the New York legislature voted to give same-sex couples the right to marry. This will certainly produce interesting journalism in the days to come, but let’s look at some of the stories that had religion angles.
A report about Delta airlines refusing to fly Jews to Saudi Arabia lit up the internet yesterday. But within hours, some of the stories were altered or pulled and I’m still trying to sort out not just what happened but what it all means. I’m going to try to reconstruct things as best I can and then ask some questions at the end. You may not need all this reconstruction, so feel free to skip to the end.
Last week, I woke up to news reports that someone was taken into custody near the Pentagon after a suspicious device was found in his car. Three major thoroughfares were shut down as police investigated. The initial reports included plenty of errors. For instance, no suspicious device was found in a car! Reports that others fled the scene also washed out. The device that “looks like a bomb”? Who knows. The “controlled explosion” they were going to do with the car? It didn’t happen.
Benoid Denizet-Lewis had yet another a fascinating story in the New York Times this past weekend. This time it was about Michael Glatze, a former gay rights activist who has since renounced his past. The two used to be friends and colleagues at XY, a San-Francisco-based national magazine for young gay men.
