Supreme Court

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Speaking of people being praised: New York Times offered solid, old-school story about Barrett

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Guess what? Judge Amy Coney Barrett is being considered, once again, for an open chair at the Supreme Court, the only branch of the United States government that seems to matter in this tense and divided land.

The odds are good that you have read about this development in the national press or even in the few remaining pages of your local newspaper.

We all know what this means, in terms of press coverage. Many of the same reporters who are perfectly comfortable calling Joe Biden a “devout” Catholic — while his actions clash with church doctrines on marriage and sex — are going to spill oceans of digital ink warning readers about the dangerous dogmas that dwell loudly in the heart and mind of Barrett. I am following all of that in social media and elsewhere.

However, let me start these discussions with a post that might surprise many readers. I would like to praise the recent New York Times story that ran with this headline: “To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court.” Also, I think it was wise to have a religion-beat professional take part in reporting and writing this story.

I am sure that combatants on both sides of this debate will find some sections in this story rather troubling. But here is the key point I want to make: Unlike many Times stories in recent years, almost all of this material comes from qualified sources (left and right) whose names are attached to their opinions and the information they provided. There are attribution clauses all over the place, just like in Times of old.

Near the top there is this short summary:

“She is the perfect combination of brilliant jurist and a woman who brings the argument to the court that is potentially the contrary to the views of the sitting women justices,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, who has praised Mr. Trump’s entire shortlist.

The nomination of a judge whom Mr. Trump was quoted last year as “saving” to be Justice Ginsburg’s replacement would almost surely plunge the nation into a bitter and divisive debate over the future of abortion rights, made even more pointed because Judge Barrett would replace a justice who was an unequivocal supporter of those rights. That is a debate Mr. Trump has not shied away from as president, as his judicial appointments and efforts to court conservatives have repeatedly shown.

As you would expect, Barrett’s critics are given plenty of space to respond — which is totally appropriate. It is also good that these voices are clearly identified, along with information about their organizations.

In other words, the story contains evidence of debate on a serious topic in the news.


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Press gets mythic about Ruth Bader Ginsburg's timely death on Rosh Hashanah eve

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Before every U.S. presidential election, there is almost always an “October surprise” that throws everything awry and has the potential to swing the contest in a completely different direction.

This year’s “surprise” happened Sept. 18 with the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The term “black swan” is also popular in social media, when talking about this kind of plot twist.

Barely a few minutes had passed after the announcement when a lot of folks noticed that she’d died just before the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, giving her instant mythic status with reporters from everything from NPR to Reuters. The latter described what last Friday was like for American Jews.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Just as many Jews in the United States were sitting down to a post-sunset Rosh Hashanah dinner on Friday, preparing to dip apples in honey to signal the sweetness of the year to come, news came of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death.

Ginsburg, the first female Jewish member of the U.S. Supreme Court, died on one of the holiest days in Judaism, as many of the country’s nearly six million Jews welcomed the new year 5781, based on the Hebrew calendar…

Her death on the eve of Rosh Hashanah also has significance in Jewish tradition, rabbis and friends said. “One of the themes of Rosh Hashanah suggests that very righteous people would die at the very end of the year because they were needed until the very end,” said Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which has been giving wall-to-wall coverage of RBG’s death, encapsulated why the mourning for Ginsburg has been so intense — because the justice “had come to represent the liberal American feminist spirit for so many.”

JTA asked Jewish leaders around the country what their congregants were doing when the news came through.

(Durham, N.C. Rabbi Matt) Soffer’s tribute was among countless salutes made by rabbis and Jewish community members this weekend as the news of Ginsburg’s death broke over Jewish communities like a wave in the first moments of the Jewish New Year, or the last moments of the one that was just ending.

In some parts of the country, many synagogues had already launched their Rosh Hashanah services on Zoom and many families had already sat down for a holiday meal when the alert came.


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Podcast-blitz: RBG black swan, global fertility, decades of Catholic sin, religious liberty and more

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Where were you when the Ruth Bader Ginsburg news hit the screen of your smartphone?

When I saw the news, the first thing I thought about was that recent Jess Fields podcast in which political scientist and data-chart-maestro Ryan Burge was working through some key points about the 2020 White House race and last-minute factors that could come into play.

This brought him to his “black swan” prediction. If you didn’t check out that podcast several weeks ago, you are going to want to flash back to it now. It’s the one with this headline, “Jess Fields meets Ryan Burge: As you would image, they're talking 'nones,' 'evangelicals,' etc.” If you prefer audio only, click here.

So what is a “black swan”? Here is that online definition from the previous post:

A black swan is an unpredictable event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences. Black swan events are characterized by their extreme rarity, their severe impact, and the widespread insistence they were obvious in hindsight.

So do I need to tell you what Burge picked as his ultimate 2020 black swan?

He dropped me this note last night:

I was actually in the middle of taping a podcast and switched over to Twitter during the middle of the conversation and saw it. And I had to interrupt the host and tell them. I don't have the video of it, but I bet the color drained out of my face.

I think this is the most precarious position our country has been in since I was born (1982). The government of the United States runs on norms more than it does on laws. And both parties seem ready and willing to violate norms in a tit for tat fashion in ways that only do damage to the future of our country.

So that’s one podcast you need to check out this morning. Before that political earthquake, I had already written a post centering on a blitz of podcasts that I knew would interest GetReligion readers-listeners.

That’s not your normal newsy Monday GetReligion, of course. However, I had a medical reason for getting something ready to go in advance.

On Friday, I headed into the hospital for one of those “minor surgery” operations. But you know the old saying: Minor surgery is surgery on somebody else.


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Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

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Where are reporters supposed to turn for a balanced list of 2020 religious pundits?

In a time of intense anxiety across America, an influential clergyman brands a president he opposes for re-election as “essentially” the same as a foreign “dictator,” and even calls him the “Fuhrer.”

When? Who? Though opponents of Donald Trump have applied an alternative N-word— “Nazi” — during the equally tense 2020 campaign, The Guy is talking about some harsh words aimed at Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was seeking his controversial third term.

The president’s accuser was the Rev. Charles Clayton Morrison, who served 39 years as editor of the “mainline” Protestant Christian Century magazine, who despised Roosevelt’s military preparedness and the draft. As an anti-war socialist, he thought Adolph Hitler’s conquests, though displeasing, could create “a united Europe governed from the German center, with a unified planned economy” that would supplant “perverted” capitalist influences.

Journalists of that era would have been well advised to also seek out contrasting religious views from a trio of eminent Roosevelt friends in the New York City clergy establishment, Protestant Professor Reinhold Niebuhr at Union Theological Seminary, Jewish Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise and the recently appointed Catholic Archbishop Francis Spellman. Reporters always need to know who to call for diverse points of view.

The Guy’s musings about matters 80 years ago are provoked by a list of 20 campaign sources suggested to the media by the Religion News Association’s handy ReligionLink website.

Journalists can reflect on how times have changed. A 2020 listing can offer no divines with the public stature of those 1940 leaders. ReligionLink cites no thinkers from religious periodicals like the Century, or Christianity Toda, or the Catholic America, Commonweal,or conservative EWTN media cluster, or the Jewish upstarts at www.tabletmag.com.

For some reason, the list bypasses religion analysts at the Washington think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Ethics & Public Policy Center, Brookings Institution or Center for American Progress. With legal conflicts raging, the listing proposes calls to Rachel Laser at Americans United for Separation of Church and State but no attorney backing contrary religious liberty claims from the Becket Fund or the Alliance Defending Freedom — groups active in arguing cases at the U.S. Supreme Court.

On a list heavy with academics, it’s surprising not to see John C. Green of the University of Akron, the poli sci patriarch on the religion factor since the 1980s, or any specialist on the vast Southern Baptist Convention and white southern evangelicalism.


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Global COVID-19 parables: What responsibility do faith groups have to the larger society?

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I’m a great fan of a magical sense of awe, that heightened state of awareness during which the transcendent feels most palpable. However, I am decidedly not a fan of magical thinking that denies the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.

I consider the latter delusional at best. The pandemic will not end because some — particularly those in positions of authority — wish it away. It can only be tamed, I believe, by limiting its spread until medical researchers develop a dependable vaccine or cure.

Until then, our responsibility as members of a highly interdependent society is to protect ourselves and each other via responsible social distancing and by always wearing a mask when adequate distancing is impossible. Anything less, in my book — speaking as someone who due to age and preexisting medical conditions is at great risk — is selfish and irresponsible.

Nor do I care whether the deniers are bikers in South Dakota, frat boys on any number of university campuses who can’t resist a keg or political libertarians who insist that their individual choices are at least as, if not more, important than the communal good in a national health emergency.

Ditto for the most sincerely devout of fatalistic religious believers who think their faith will protect them and their co-religionists. Or who insist that government — any secular government — lacks the authority to limit their religious expression in any way.

My news feeds have been replete with such examples. Here are three that have particularly aroused my pique. I consider each a clear example of self-aggrandizing, potentially deadly religious entitlement.

One story is from Israel and concerns a group of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who have insisted on making their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to a Ukrainian city where their deceased spiritual leader is buried. This, despite the probability that they’re likely to bring the pandemic with them.

A second from, South Korea, tells the tale of a megachurch that found itself at the center of a coronavirus cluster, which it blames on misleading figures released by government opponents.

The third involves the Rev. John MacArthur of Los Angeles’ Grace Community Church, who recently claimed that the number of American COVID-19 deaths is way below the generally accepted figures reported by mainstream news outlets. MacArthur claimed that there is no pandemic.


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Wait a minute: This New York Times Story is about the state of GOP life in Tennessee?

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Well, I’m not in Kansas anymore. I’m back in Tennessee, but I’m borrowing WiFi in the lobby of an auto-repair establishment (don’t ask the details) while trying to get home.

But being back in the Volunteer state did remind me that I wanted to comment on a recent New York Times piece that ran just before our state primaries. The story is about the brutal, at times, race to win the GOP nomination to chase the U.S. Senate seat that for years belonged to the courtly Lamar Alexander.

The establishment candidate, Bill Hagerty won the race, but it was tight. The Times team focused, of course, on the toxic existence of Citizen Donald Trump. The president’s endorsement of Hagerty was important, but that was only one reason that Tennessee Republicans — at least the ones I know — were so torn up in this race.

But there’s no need to discuss cultural and religious issues in a Bible Belt state like Tennessee when you can focus exclusively on You. Know. Who. Thus, this double-decker headline:

Tennessee Republicans, Once Moderate and Genteel, Turn Toxic in the Trump Era

In the Senate primary race to replace Lamar Alexander, two candidates are fighting to see who can better emulate the president. It isn’t pretty.

The thesis statement near the end adds:

What is perhaps already clear, however, is that the Republican Party that Mr. Alexander long sought to shape — a “governing party,” he once wrote, that translated “principled ideas” into “real solutions” — is not the one he will ultimately leave behind.

Both of the major candidates were conservatives, but one — Hagerty — had a blue-chip GOP establishment heritage, with ties to President George W. Bush. The other, Dr. Manny Sethi — an Indian-American, Harvard-educated surgeon at Vanderbilt University hospital — was clearly running as the outsider.

Believe it or not, Trump backed the GOP establishment guy even as Sethi attempted to appeal to voters on many of Trump’s cultural issues.


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Talking Black Swans: Burge and Fields on religion and politics 2020 (tmatt on the road)

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It’s a bit of a slow week here at GetReligion, even though lots of things are happening in the world of religion news and politics.

There’s great stuff to read, but that’s happening with the solid work of the rest of the GetReligion team since I am on the road this whole week — out in the plains of Kansas to visit with family and speak to a forum at America’s greatest religion book store (click here for info). I’m speaking about C.S. Lewis and a scholar named George Sayer.

Meanwhile, I am trying to ignore politics. I’m the kind of guy who gets depressed when there isn’t a single person on either major-party ticket who can be described, accurately, as an old-school First Amendment liberal. I’m talking about folks who care about the rights of religious minorities and independent journalists and are committed to the First Amendment rights of everyone, even their political enemies.

So I am going to let other folks talk about the scary side of religion and politics, right now.

In this case, we have another long, long podcast by a friend of this weblog — Jess Fields of Houston — and GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge (who seems to be everywhere these days, with good cause).

You may recall that I wrote a post about Fields when I visited his podcast: “Jess Fields got tired of short, shallow news interviews: So he started doing loooong podcasts.”

Then Burge visited with Fields in this totally logical episode: “Jess Fields meets Ryan Burge: As you would image, they're talking 'nones,' 'evangelicals,' etc.”

Now we have a straightforward Fields-Burge 2.0 about religion and the 2020 election year. For those who prefer audio-only, click here.

You’ll want to hang on for the whole thing.

Why? Does the term “black swan” mean anything to you?


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Thinking with Ryan Burge and Damon Linker: Blessed be the ties that used to bind America?

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A friend of mine who was a data journalist long before that was normal — Anthony DeBarros — used to tell my Washington Journalism Center students the following: A good reporter can look at almost any solid set of survey statistics and see potential news stories.

So here we go again. When the Pew Research Center released its epic “Nones on the Rise” study in 2012, all kinds of reporters studied the details and saw all kinds of stories. The updates on those numbers keep producing headlines, with good cause.

But if was veteran scholar John C. Green — yes, I quote him a lot — who saw, even before the public release of those numbers (click here and then here for GetReligion reminders), a very important politics-and-religion story. Here is the crucial info, as he stated it on the record in 2012:

The unaffiliated overwhelmingly reject ancient doctrines on sexuality with 73 percent backing same-sex marriage and 72 percent saying abortion should be legal in all, or most, cases. Thus, the “Nones” skew heavily Democratic as voters — with 75 percent supporting Barack Obama in 2008. The unaffiliated are now a stronger presence in the Democratic Party than African-American Protestants, white mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

“It may very well be that in the future the unaffiliated vote will be as important to the Democrats as the traditionally religious are to the Republican Party,” said Green, addressing the religion reporters. “If these trends continue, we are likely to see even sharper divisions between the political parties.”

Of course, the modern Democratic Party also includes one of America’s most fervently religious camps, as well — African-American churchgoers.

Many have predicted the obvious: At some point, there will be tensions there. Woke Democrats are, for example, on the rise and grabbing lots of headlines. But who saved Joe Biden’s political neck in the South Carolina primary? How does he please the woke choir and the black church?

With that in mind, let’s look at two must-file charts that political scientist Ryan Burge circulated the other day via his must-follow Twitter account. And keep in mind that we are building toward a new Damon Linker essay with this blunt headline: “Could America split up?”


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More insights and information about future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights

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Since the July 9 Guy Memo about how to cover future conflicts between religious and LGBTQ rights there have been significant further comments that reporters will want to keep in mind.

In addition, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cancer recurrence at age 87 underscores for the media that the president and Senate elected in November will choose any future Supreme Court and other judicial appointees who will act on such cases. Pundits think this factor helped victories in 2016 by Republican Senators and President Donald Trump.

The tensions here are evident with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, which issued its first report July 16 (tmatt post on that topic here). Liberals decried this panel’s formation due to the members’ supposed ideological tilt. The panel is chaired by a devout Catholic, Harvard Law School’s Mary Ann Glendon (the daughter of a newspaper reporter).

The New York Times reported that Pompeo’s speech presenting this report was “divisive” because he emphasized that the commission believes “property rights and religious liberty” are “foremost” in consideration. (The report also defies current protests by lauding Founding Fathers even while admitting they owned slaves.)

Writers will want to analyze this lengthy text (.pdf here) for themselves. It does seem to The Guy that the commission’s focus on the Bill of Rights guarantee of “free exercise” of religion, ratified 228 years ago, suggests this might — as a global statement — outweigh recent LGBTQ rights that the Supreme Court has vindicated alongside its defense of religious liberty claims in other cases.

Reactions worth pondering have come from, among others, evangelical lawyer David French, who writes for thedispatch.com and, in this case, Time magazine, University of Virginia Law Professor Douglas Laycock in a National Review interview and Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, a leading critic of the transgender cause as in his book “When Harry Became Sally.”

French, who has done yeoman work on rights claims by religious groups, is surprisingly optimistic.


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