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I was stuck in a Southern California airport for a few hours the other day and, of course, this meant spending some quality time with a dead-tree-pulp edition of the Los Angeles Times.
The GetReligion crew has been traveling the last two days to attend planning meetings for this blog and other related projects.
Well now. Please note that almost nothing in the current torrent of debate about the Rod Dreher column has anything to do with the purpose of the original blog article, except that this is a demonstration of how hard this kind of bitter debate is to cover in a newspaper.
(Cue: drum roll) Here is something that seems a bit bizarre to contemplate. GetReligion readers, I bring you the journalistic team of Rod Dreher and Alexander Cockburn. It will take a moment to get to the second half of that equation.
I think we can expect the New York Times op-ed page to continue its high-wire routine for quite some time to come, trying to find the balance between fury, denial and insight when it comes to the pew gap. More on that in a minute.
Under normal conditions, I am not a big-time reader of the business sections in American newspapers. Most of the time, they focus 99 percent of their ink on people who own businesses, instead of covering the people who work in them, are affected by their actions or who purchase goods and services from them. It’s a corporate thing. In a way, it’s like the old religion pages in newspapers that only covered what was going on in religious denominations and bureaucracies. Where are the people?
Back in my Rocky Mountain News days, I covered a liberal Catholic conference on the subject of homophobia. Speaker after speaker defined homophobia in religious terms, stressing that it was a sinful condition in which people acted in ways that showed they feared or hated homosexuals. Then they stressed that people who advocated the Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines on this subject (especially the “objectively disordered” concept) were guilty of homophobia.
The doorbell rang Sunday afternoon and it turned out to be a bleached-blond Gen X man from the MoveOn.org organization. He said he was there to get out the vote for the Democratic Party. He asked me if I had voted or decided for whom I would vote. Was I registered?
