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President Obama announced a shift on on Friday for how the government will handle immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents, a decision setting off a chain of reactions from outrage to elation to apathy.
Why does huge news frequently drop on a Friday? It's an old political trick to get bad news out in the Friday Night News Dump. Reporters loathe these as they want nothing more than to head to the bar (or whatever) and begin the weekend. This year has seen quite a few Friday news releases affecting religion reporters, mostly related somehow to the HHS mandate requiring religious groups to purchase insurance coverage that may violate their religious beliefs. And this Friday fit into that pattern with some pretty big news about one of the key players in this debate switching sides. Here's how the Washington Post put it:
The White House has lost perhaps its most prominent Catholic ally in its controversial effort to expand contraception coverage, with the huge Catholic Health Association saying Friday that the mandate for most religious employers to offer coverage would not “adequately meet the religious liberty concerns.”
The change of position at the association, the country’s largest group of nonprofit health care providers, comes as polls show President Obama and Mitt Romney tied among registered Catholic voters. In the last four of five presidential races, the candidate who won Catholics won the presidency.
Ah politics. Something tells me, however, that we won't see the same types of stories about CHA that we were seeing in recent weeks about the Catholic bishops and other opponents of the mandate having a secret partisan plot against the current chief executive. I liked how this paragraph explained the situation in laymen's terms:
When I makes tea I makes tea, as old mother Grogan said. And when I makes water I makes water ⦠Begob, ma’am, says Mrs. Cahill, God send you don’t make them in the one pot.
As a rule, your GetReligionistas think that veteran religion-beat specialists do a consistently better job of getting the basic facts right, especially when their work is compared with general-assignment reporters who are shipped off to cover complicated stories that often have years, decades or centuries of past history.
Today’s immigration news becomes a little more real when you know people it will directly affect. Whether or not you personally agree with the decision, it will impact faith communities as much as the rest of the country.
There were a couple of interesting posts on CNN’s Belief Blog that caught my eye yesterday. The first was a post extrapolating from Bryce Harper’s “clown question” retort a deeper meaning relative to the Washington Nationals phenom’s Mormon beliefs. I then caught myself researching various baseball players’ religious affiliations and was quite surprised to find out that another player I’d met in a bar once was also identified as LDS. But the point being it’s a great hook for a religion angle.
As we’ve lamented a few times (or a million) here at GetReligion, nobody puts on a staged-for-media hatefest like the spiritual termites of the Westboro Baptist Church.
I’m going to back into the media analysis here by mentioning that there is a very media-savvy, progressive public relations non-profit called Faith in Public Life. The Washington Post describes the group as one of several organizations that “that meld religion and liberal politics” and the group itself describes its work here:
As the battles continue over religious liberty issues — by which I mean battles over issues that the White House has described as having religious-liberty implications — journalists continue to struggle with that old, old issue of simplistic labeling.
