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Okay, everybody. Hang in there. We have just a couple weeks left for election coverage. Add an extra couple of days for mainstream media freak outs or rejoicing and then, hopefully, we’ll have a bit of a respite.
The Los Angeles Times ran two stories about the California marriage proposition that deal heavily with religion. The first is a puff piece — a pro-same-sex marriage press release, really — about the gay weddings a rabbi has performed:
Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” (by which he meant the bus and the newsboy) was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.– Letter 1, The Screwtape Letters
The Associated Press television writer David Bauder deserves credit for catching the somewhat subtle religion ghost in one of the two Saturday Night Live skits involving Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
The big religion story with voters this year has been white evangelicals. Will they remain supporters of pro-life Republican candidates or will they drift leftward? Despite the thousands of column inches devoted to the topic, it looks like they’ve remained largely in the GOP camp — although anything could happen.
Californians will vote next month on whether only marriages involving one man and one woman should be recognized. Proponents of the measure have argued in television advertisements that children will be taught about same-sex marriage in public schools and that they will be taught that same-sex marriage is equivalent to traditional marriage.
This season’s presidential election debates have been something of a letdown from a variety of perspectives. One area is a lack of discussion about religion. Feel free to disagree, but I believe that one’s religion informs a person’s public policy to varying degrees.
In the Oct. 20 edition of Newsweek, longtime film critic David Ansen criticizes director Oliver Stone for not showing greater depth in his depiction of George W. Bush. Fair enough, until one stumbles across this double-barrel shotgun blast of boorish stereotyping:
