Anti-Religious Bias

Initiative 26 -- which would have amended the Mississippi state constitution to include unborn children as persons protected under the law -- was rejected by Magnolia State voters last night. In response, Georgetown professor and Washington Post "On Faith" blog contributor Jacques Berlinerblau quickly hacked out a post celebrating the temporary victory over the "devastating sleeper cell of a…

The day before Mississippi voters went to the polls to decide whether to amend the state constitution to define "person" to include unborn children as early as the point of conception, Washington Post's Sally Quinn set out to denounce Initiative 26 on the "On Faith" blog that she edits. Quinn, an atheist, groused that religious voters in the Magnolia State may make a significant change to the…

The arrest of former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky on pedophilia charges has absolutely nothing to do with the Catholic Church.  Neither does an alleged coverup by Penn State officials of repeated allegations of sexual misconduct against Sandusky. Yet religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman found a way to shoehorn the Church into the story in a November 6 "Faith & Reason"…

“[S]ocial conservatives believe that efforts to protect gays from assault, discrimination or bullying impinge on their religious freedom to express and act on their belief that homosexuality is an abomination. That’s stating it harshly, but it is the underlying belief,” Time religion reporter Amy Sullivan huffed in a November 4 Swampland blog post on the magazine’s website. “[T]he Michigan…

Yesterday I noted the unbalanced reporting of Washington Post blogger Elizabeth Flock regarding a Georgia Christian university's new policy requiring all faculty to agree to abide by certain standards of conduct, including not engaging in homosexual acts, premarital sex, or adultery. Today I found an equally biased and harshly-toned blog post from Nsenga Burton, editor-at-large of the…

Here we go again. A Christian college is revising its code of conduct for faculty members, expecting a commitment to personal conduct that's in line with biblical ethics, including on matters of sexual behavior. But, of course, all the liberal media will focus on is a new "ban" on gay or lesbian faculty members at Shorter University, a Baptist institution with campuses in Atlanta and Rome,…

Those prestigious publishers at Simon & Schuster selected All Saints Day to unleash the book world's latest attempt at mocking Christianity. It’s called "The Last Testament, by God." The author is David Javerbaum, a top writer for 11 years for "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, perhaps America's leading religion-hating TV network. Is it any surprise that the critics are loving it?

Outspoken Christian athlete Tim Tebow, now the starting quarterback for the Denver Broncos, has been widely criticized by many in the media. NFL analysts are starting to admit that criticism, in large part, has been because of his faith. ''Inside the NFL'' analyst and former Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Cris Collinsworth concluded that much of the hatred against Tebow was based on his…

Actress Susan Sarandon is notorious for espousing liberal causes and bashing conservatives. Now, she is attacking the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI. In a public interview with Bob Balaban at the Hamptons Film Festival, Sarandon told an audience that she had sent a copy of a book to Pope John Paul II. She then said: “The last Pope, not this Nazi one we have now.” When chided…

It was said of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, that if he won the 1928 presidential election he would take orders from the Vatican and not uphold the Constitution. John F. Kennedy famously confronted that anti-Catholic prejudice in a 1960 speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. Kennedy said in part, "I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute;…

Only at the self-described "Essential Global News Network" could the Sunday deaths in Egypt of 26 people, mostly Coptic Christians, be kept out of a story's headline and their mention deferred until the third paragraph. But that's what readers will see in the four-paragraph grab which follows from a much longer item by the Associated Press's Maggie Michael yesterday:

Preaching that homosexuality is a sin is "bullying" and akin to "child molestation" and must be stopped, argued Mitchell Gold of Faith in America on today's "MSNBC Live" hosted by Thomas Roberts. For his part, openly gay host Roberts failed to question Gold's assertion or to hold out that Gold's view may at best border on anti-religious bigotry (emphasis mine; video courtesy of MRCTV's Bob…

NBC’s series The Playboy Club remains in search of an audience, so some stars are lashing out on Twitter at the Parents Television Council, who’s calling for the show to be cancelled, since it promotes one of the world’s leading pornography brands. David Krumholtz – who many might remember from CBS’s “Numb3rs”– attacked the PTC on Twitter for “randomly” choosing the Playboy show, but…

If we post this story on Facebook, will the company remove it? According to a new study from the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) and the American Center for Law and Justice, there's a good chance it will. NRB conducted a study of "the practices of Apple and its iTunes App Store, Google, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, as well as Internet service providers AT&T, Comcast and Verizon…