Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
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:
Katie Petroski of the Austin American-Statesman has written an elegant profile of Lloyd Dalton, a longtime telephone lineman by day and guitarist by night, who rediscovered his faith after a deadly shooting in a bar.
It’s official. Judge Sonia Maria Sotomayor is a Catholic, or a “Catholic,” or something like that. Maybe.
This has been a big day for news, has it not? In Washington, D.C., President Obama nominated (see tmatt’s post) a woman who could be the first Hispanic ( which has prompted some debate over why Benjamin Cardozo didn’t count) and the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court.
Just what the U.S. Supreme Court needed — another Roman Catholic. This would make six out of nine, for those keeping track.
This is one of those cases when the mainstream press cannot be accused of burying the lede. The headline in the New York Times says it all (kind of): “2 Ex-Timesmen Say They Had a Tip on Watergate First.”
Yesterday Doug complimented American media on showing “commendable restraint” in reacting to the more than 2,500-page report documenting decades of child abuse by Irish monks and nuns. I have to admit that I am torn between being convinced that the facts do speak for themselves, and a sense that readers should be faced with the scale and breadth of the horrors inflicted on institutionalized children — all the more ghastly because it was done by men and women “of God.”
Journalists who have been around for a few decades may remember one of the “in” jokes that circulated after the birth of USA Today, the joke that claimed that there was going to be a new Pulitzer Prize awarded for the best investigative paragraph.
