I was seriously sick this week — bed rest and the whole nine yards — and am catching up on some news. I’ve sent out an APB on Twitter (from both my personal account and the GetReligion account) asking for any good stories at all — anywhere — by the mainstream media about religious liberty this week. Would you send along any links you have to stories that did a good job covering the major religious liberty issues in play right now in America regarding this HHS mandate from the Obama administration?
Spoon-feeding partisan talking points
At the beginning of last month, tmatt highlighted the main framing device in the news and commentary in the battle over the Obama Administration’s mandate requiring employers to provide coverage for abortifacients, sterilization and contraception even if they have religious objections:
Zombie Muhammad and the First Amendment
We’ve had a few readers send in links to coverage of a First Amendment-related case out of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. It’s a sad story that goes back to a 2011 Halloween parade. A small group of atheists marched in the parade, dressed as a Zombie Pope and a Zombie Muhammad. This outraged one Muslim father who attended the parade with his wife and son.
Someone's confused about Santorum
An editor, whose religion I don’t know, sent this Associated Press story along with the note, “Maybe I’m too sensitive to these things, but this strikes me as kind of a vile headline if you think about it–not that some people mistake him for a Protestant, but the implication is that they wouldn’t support him if they knew he was Catholic.”
Media shirk debate on religious liberty
Unanswered questions in Quran burning reports
Have you been following the reports out of Afghanistan after it was learned that Qurans and other holy books had been burned by troops? The story keeps developing. More people have been killed, including NATO troops, and President Obama sent a letter of apology to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Phony outrage over "phony theology"?
It’s been an interesting, if tiring, few weeks in media criticism and the culture wars. We saw how national media figures immediately jumped to help Planned Parenthood’s campaign against the Komen Foundation and how they have been working hard to frame objections to a federal mandate (that critics say seriously harms religious liberty) as a war on women. So when news broke this weekend about some supposedly alarming things that Rick Santorum said, I wasn’t sure I could handle another round.
A blot on ESPN's escutcheon?
I was in New York City last weekend when the infamous and seemingly racist headline ran about the Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin. The phrase that was used — a chink in the armor — is not racist on its own. If you’re unfamiliar with the idiom, you can read about it here. But one of the words in the idiom can be a racist slur. I was talking about it with friends and no one could believe that the headline was posted. We freaked out, actually. But one friend wondered if there was any way that the editor was younger and didn’t know about the racist connotation. It certainly worked under the non-racist definition — the article was discussing Lin’s turnovers as his Achilles’ heel, a fatal flaw in his performance.
A tale of two rallies
Last month, we looked at how the online producers at the Washington CBS station posted a photo slideshow that appeared under the rather literal headline:
