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Let’s return to one of my favorite hot-button topics, the role of religion in the public schools. Whether it sets a precedent or not, the question of how to teach religion in the Texas schools is roiling the State Board of Education, schools, and activists concerned either that religion isn’t getting a fair shake or that a certain viewpoint (read: Christian) is being promoted.
The story had to be written, so the New York Times turned to a veteran who has excelled as the newsroom’s designated expert on doing serious, fair and accurate coverage of cultural and religious conservatives. Yes, the Times has such a person. I have heard media critics on the right praise David D. Kirkpatrick far more often than I have heard them attack him.
Last week the man who would have been the 45th head of the continent-spanning Ottoman dynasty, founded by Osman I in 1299, died. Ertugrul Osman instead lived in a rent-controlled flat in New York City.
Hey reporters! You can run, but you cannot hide. Sooner or later, the tiny flock of activists known as the Westboro Baptist Church will show up in your zip code.
There’s something I just like about the Q&A format. It’s nice to just see the particular questions that reporters choose to ask their sources as well as how those sources respond. There are two that I would like to highlight. The first comes from the Washington Post‘s “Voices of Power” series. That’s where reporters sit down with inside-the-beltway power players for a videotaped chat.
Here is another look into the church-state future, another case of a classic liberal value from the past clashing with a powerful liberal value from the modern world.
I still remember my wife’s remark when I told her I was going to the Reagan Library for the annual banquet hosted by the Republican Jewish Coalition:
I’m saving the best (Got News?) for last. But first, let’s cover culture war news from the Values Voter Summit held in D.C. And right off the bat I wanna say (yeah, that’s how we talk in Philly — you gotta problem with that?) that I’m ambivalent about any journalist who uses that term as a descriptor rather than the title of the Family Research Values conference. The term implies that conservative activists are the only ones with values, or that those on the left are value-free, or that voters who fell into the middle of the spectrum don’t take their values to the voting booth. In general, the reporters below tend to be clear that this is a term of choice, not of reality.
As the Divine Mrs. M.Z. Hemingway has been demonstrating, the mainstream press has shown quite a bit of interest in the religious roots of the anti-ACORN video reporter Hannah Giles and, in particular, the social and political views of her minister father and, to a lesser degree by inference, their home Clash Church.
