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Have you heard the old joke about the Sunday School teacher trying to convince her students that it was not the Red Sea but the Sea of Reeds that the Israelites crossed? She explains that Moses hadn’t miraculously parted the water to enable the crossing. Rather, the sea was actually very shallow — only a couple of inches or feet deep, in fact. So while God did rescue his people, he didn’t use supernatural means.
Here at GetReligion, we depend on faithful readers to help us spot religion ghosts in news stories across the nation.
This week the U.S. Senate voted against taking up a major military bill that would have allowed the repeal of President Bill Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. That’s the policy that keeps the military from doing anything to find out if members are homosexual while also keeping openly gay or lesbian people from serving in the military.
Surely it’s a comment on the state of things in Washington, D.C., that the mainstream press considered it a big story that President Barack Obama decided to go to church. I mean, he went to church out in public, as opposed to attending a private service at Camp David.
Piercings are a sore subject for me. I had to work (keep my room clean for several months) to get permission to get my ears pierced at 13. It was clearly a sign of privilege (and a tool for my parents to hold me under their thumbs). I reminded my father of this recently and he said, “I did not realize we made you keep your room clean. I guess we should have had you write a research paper on ear piercing.”
From my growing guilt file, one story keeps popping up. The Portland Press Herald in Maine ran a story on September 11 about a local observance of the end of Ramadan. The story ran on the top of the front page, I believe, and had a large photo with it.
Forsyth County, Georgia v. Nationalist Movement was a 1992 Supreme Court case dealing with freedom of speech. Forsyth County had this ordinance that mandated permits for private demonstrations. County administrators decided on the fee, which was only up to $1,000. When a group of white nationalists proposed a demonstration against the Martin Luther King, Jr., federal holiday, they were levied a fee of $100. They sued, claiming the ordinance violates their free speech guarantees. The Supreme Court agreed.
All that talk about the possible death of print media? Totally premature. Christine O’Donnell’s big win in Delaware’s Republican primary for U.S. Senate has spilled enough ink to keep the dead-tree news business operating at least through the November election.
