On Monday, Fusion senior editor Felix Salmon echoed New York Times writer Mark Oppenheimer's call for the end of the tax exemption of religious institutions, but took it one step further: he called for the specific targeting of churches that "remain steadfastly bigoted on the subject" of same-sex "marriage." Salmon contended on Fusion.net that "if your organization does not support the right of gay men and women to marry, then the government should be very clear that you're in the wrong. And it should certainly not bend over backwards to give you the privilege of tax exemption."
Religious Right
By Matthew Balan | June 29, 2015 | 6:37 PM EDT
CNN's Chris Cuomo again acted like a LGBT activist on Monday's New Day, as he interviewed Peter Sprigg from the socially conservative Family Research Council. Cuomo raised the specter of Jim Crow when he claimed that a proposed First Amendment Defense Act in Congress "does smack familiar to what happened in the wake of the miscegenation laws and the civil rights laws, where ...some cited the Bible; some stated religion – and said, it's against my beliefs. I shouldn't have to participate."
By Matthew Balan | June 27, 2015 | 1:07 AM EDT
On Friday, ABC's World News Tonight aired a completely one-sided report on the Supreme Court's ruling that legalized same-sex "marriage" in all 50 states. Terry Moran hyped how Justice Anthony Kennedy "wrote today's landmark opinion describing the stakes in this case in the loftiest terms." Moran failed to include any soundbites from social conservative opponents of the decision, and hyped how "Justice Scalia, in a rage, scorning Kennedy's poetic opinion as little more than a 'fortune cookie.'"
By Matthew Balan | June 22, 2015 | 12:34 PM EDT
On Monday, the Washington Post's Express tabloid ran a blatantly anti-Catholic ad on its front page. The full-page advertisement from the far-left "Catholics For Choice" group spoofed the famous World War I-era "I Want You" military recruiting poster, and evoked the worst of 19th century Know-Nothingism. Instead of Uncle Sam, a caricature of a Catholic bishop with a miter on his head points at the viewer, and asks, "We Want You To Help Us Discriminate."
By Tom Johnson | June 20, 2015 | 9:35 PM EDT
Group loyalty is a big part of politics on both sides of the fence, but as far as lefty pundit Marcotte is concerned, it’s become so inflated on the right that it often crowds out crucial things like “basic common sense.”
In a Friday Talking Points Memo column, Marcotte asserted that “conservatives are going way too far with this knee-jerk tendency to believe ‘their’ people can do no wrong and to assume ‘liberals’ are some subversive force out to destroy everything. It’s mildly amusing when Republican voters are mindlessly preferring religious nutcases” -- the Duggars -- “to a centrist liberal who probably gave them health care."
By Matthew Balan | June 15, 2015 | 4:27 PM EDT
Jeffrey Tayler of The Atlantic treated religious belief as a mental illness in a Sunday column for the far-left website Salon, which targeted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia for "imposing your obscurantist dogma on impressionable young minds" – specifically, "the bizarre Catholic cult." Tayler made no secret of his anti-Catholic bigotry when he slammed the supposed "pedophile pulpiteers of your creed [who] have...warp[ed] the minds of their credulous 'flocks' for two millennia."
By Matthew Balan | June 8, 2015 | 3:33 PM EDT
On Sunday's MediaBuzz on Fox News, former CNN correspondent Lola Ogunnaike slammed the reaction of many conservatives to the sexual abuse scandal surrounding the Duggar family. Host Howard Kurtz wondered if "some conservative commentators going easy on the family, because it's somebody who is seen as on their side." Ogunnaike replied, "Absolutely. I think that if this family was a group of atheists, they would have thrown the book at them. They would have raked them over the coals – drawn and quartered the entire family in the middle of Times Square."
Amanda Marcotte: Will Duggar Scandal Teach Republicans Lesson About ‘Dangers of Embracing Religious Extremists’?
By Tom Johnson | May 29, 2015 | 10:46 AM EDT In a Tuesday post for Slate, lefty pundit Marcotte explored the religious right’s fascination with (and perhaps exploitation of) the Duggar family and how it might change in light of the Josh Duggar sexual-abuse scandal. “The Duggars' [religious] extremism elicited admiration and maybe a little envy among the ranks” of Christian conservatives, Marcotte commented, “but perhaps now Republicans will learn a lesson about the dangers of embracing religious extremists.”
Marcotte thinks the GOP’s affinity for the Duggars exemplifies the religious right’s misogynistic race to the bottom: “Just as urban liberals compete to see who can eat the most organic food and libertarian types race to see who can have the most polluting truck, Christian conservatives compete to see who can deny women's autonomy the hardest.”
By Matthew Balan | May 27, 2015 | 2:54 PM EDT
Wednesday's New Day shut out social conservatives from a panel discussion on Senator Marco Rubio's Tuesday remark that "if you do not support same-sex marriage, you're labeled a homophobe and a hater," and that "the next step is to argue that the teachings of mainstream Christianity – the Catechism of the Catholic Church – is hate speech." Instead, the CNN morning show brought on a Republican and Democrat – Ana Navarro and Donna Brazile – who both blasted Rubio for his warning.
By Matthew Balan | May 21, 2015 | 6:39 PM EDT
Patricia Miller ecstatically touted that the apparent "demographic free-fall" of the Catholic Church is "good news for the country" in a Thursday item for Salon. Miller bemoaned the American Catholic bishops' "outsize role in U.S. politics" in the past, given their opposition to abortion, contraception, and same-sex "marriage," and asserted that "with their flock fleeing and Pope Francis espousing a more conciliatory form of Catholicism less focused on the pelvic zone, the U.S. bishops don't look so powerful."
By Tom Johnson | May 13, 2015 | 10:38 AM EDT
A new Pew Research study found that between 2007 and 2014, the percentage of Americans self-identifying as Christian fell from 78.4 to 70.6. In a Tuesday post, Martin Longman speculated about causes for the dropoff, commenting that “the Republican Party’s embrace of a very conservative interpretation of Christianity” may be “undermining people’s faith.”
Longman added that it’s not solely the fault of the domestic religious right: “Islamic radicals…committing unspeakable atrocities in Allah’s name” and “Jewish radicals…standing in the way of [Israeli-Palestinian] peace negotiations” share the blame. “Most of the war and killing that is going on in the world today is generated by disputes between or within a small handful of very well-established traditional religions,” he remarked. “If the whole world woke up tomorrow with no memory of the New Testament, the Torah, or the Koran, it’s quite possible that peace would break out in ways that seem unthinkable today.”
By Tom Johnson | May 8, 2015 | 6:10 PM EDT
The faltering religious right would be well served to borrow a strategy from gay activists, but it almost certainly won’t, contended The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky in a Friday column.
In Tomasky’s telling, the gay-rights movement in the 1980s alienated many because it could be self-righteous to the point of belligerence, but eventually “the leaders of the movement saw that it was more important to persuade public opinion than to shock it. And so the public-relations strategy around the movement for same-sex marriage became ‘we’re just like you.’ And it worked.”
The religious right, Tomasky argued, “can’t change. When you believe the Big Guy Himself handed you down your positions, you’re not going to alter them or indeed even the way you talk about them. What is the religious right’s version of ‘we’re just like you’? I don’t think there is one. Because they are not like the rest of us, at least when it comes to politics.”