Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Even as disaffected American liberals consider moving to Canada in the wake of the last week’s elections, many Canadian journalists are trying to figure out what the heck happened. Some of the early attempts at deciphering the results are not promising.
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.
A few years ago I served on an advisory board for Forward Movement, an editorial arm of the Episcopal Church that actually publishes tracts (it calls them pamphlets), a daily devotional called Forward Day by Day and a number of books. I disagree with much of what Forward publishes, but I feel an enduring affection for the people behind the imprint.
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?
Like Garry Wills, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expresses concern that George W. Bush and “Christian fundamentalists” (those increasingly inseparable and undefined words) are ultimately opposed to the Founding Fathers:
Judging from today’s reactions to the election, the deep thinkers at the former paper of record need to get a grip. I’m the lead-off hitter — LeBlanc and Mattingly come by later in the day to bat cleanup — but the shrillarity of Gary Wills’ and Maureen Dowd’s slow curve-ball should be enough for at least a lazy double.
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 new majority is more theocratic than Republican, as Republican was previously understood; the defeat of the old moderate Republican Party is far more decisive than the loss by the Democrats. And there are no checks and balances. The terminal illness of Chief Justice William Rehnquist signals new appointments to the Supreme Court that will alter law for more than a generation. Conservative promises to dismantle constitutional law established since the New Deal will be acted upon. Roe vs. Wade will be overturned and abortion outlawed.
Jonathan V. Last at the Daily Standard: “The Catholic church dodged a bullet with Kerry’s defeat. Had Kerry won, there would have been a showdown among the Catholic bishops over whether or not to deny Kerry the Eucharist. Whatever course the bishops would have chosen carried its own set of unpleasant consequences. At some point, the Catholic church is going to have to confront the issue of high-profile Catholic politicians. Kerry’s loss gives them the luxury of confronting it in their own time.”
