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I was watching MSNBC on Monday night, but the Home Companion heard the theme song from Countdown with Keith Olbermann begin, and then changed the channel. No one else in the room — neither I nor the three spayed female cats we liberated from the nearest no-kill animal shelter — dared voice even the briefest protest. Such is the dismal state of my life in November 2008 in what Americans, in our hubris, call the United States of America.
The other day I noted the one-sided story in the Los Angeles Times about a likable lesbian couple who live in an area that voted in support of Proposition 8, which defines marriage as a heterosexual union.
Celebrity news is not a big part of what we do here, but when a story is about an actor as colorful as Mark Wahlberg, don’t you want to know some of the details when the headline is as provocative as this one?
Sometimes one or two words can make a lot of difference when you are dealing with complex issues of law and doctrine.
Probably the best example of how the mainstream media completely games the coverage of same-sex marriage is an article from the Los Angeles Times. “Election leaves gay couple feeling isolated in conservative bastion” is about these two heroic lesbians who opposed Proposition 8 while living in a conservative neighborhood in Riverside County.
So the protests against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints because of its support for Proposition 8 are continuing and receiving quite a bit of mainstream media coverage. Proposition 8 passed a constitutional amendment defining marriage as an institution involving one man and one woman. Stories involve everything from Mormon churches being vandalized to large-scale protests in urban areas.
Three of the major festivals of the church year are Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. In America, we celebrate Christmas with abandon, Easter with a minor uptick in chocolate sales, and Pentecost hardly at all.
Billy Graham turned 90 at the end of this past week, a landmark event that received very little press, all things considered. There were other things going on in the nation, of course.
