Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Having spent part of the 1990s covering Colorado’s controversial gay rights limitation measure Amendment 2 (which was passed by voters but declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court), I know there are always more than two sides to these debates. That’s part of what makes a recent Washington Post story so intriguing.
Steve already looked at some of the media coverage of the story about Switzerland banning the construction of minarets on mosques. For those of us accustomed to First Amendment-protected religious freedom, the vote probably comes as a shock and disappointment. Nairobi reader William Black wrote about a couple of the problems he saw in the coverage. He was disappointed with the vote saying that, as a Christian, he sees no reason to fear Muslim voices in the marketplace of ideas or Muslim presence in his neighborhood. And he worried that this vote would set a dangerous precedent for limiting the freedom of other religious groups in Europe.
The little movie that could, otherwise known at “The Blind Side,” is starting to cause some tremors out on the left coast.
Gaurdian reporter Chris McGreal has written a subtle and finely nuanced piece headlined “Religious right launches fresh assault on US abortion rights.”
I haven’t been following Swiss politics, so the headline on top of page A6 of Monday’s New York Times, “Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques,” was surprising, as was the lengthy (800+ words) article:
If you backed up a few years, or even a decade or two, one of the subjects that religion writers in the mainstream press used to debate could be summed up in this question: “Are religion columns a good thing?”
Every now and then, the box-office prophets in Hollywood are shocked, shocked to discover that large numbers of Americans like to buy tickets to movies that are funny, clean, well-crafted and capable of tugging at a heart-string or two. There’s another tricky little subject hiding in there that many media people just don’t get, but we’ll look at that a bit later.
Every year we read about the War on Christmas. The mainstream media love to cover stories about those Scrooges who ban the use of any specific greetings related to Christmas and the old curmudgeons who complain about the same.
<a href=It’s odd to see some of your former classmates quoted in The New York Times as if they are newsworthy. Don’t get me wrong–many of them are doing cool and interesting things. Samuel G. Freedman profiles one of these classmates in a nice, upbeat story to show how young evangelicals are taking up interests in climate change, AIDS and poverty in his On Religion column for the Times.
