Anti-Religious Bias

You can usually set your watch to it. First, you learn about a "progressive" or liberal darling who makes a controversial, over-the-top statement which would get him or her in serious trouble with the general public if widely known. About 24 hours later, you visit establishment press coverage of the event, especially at the Associated Press, and find not a hint that anything controversial…

Catholic leaders joined the Media Research Center (MRC), the Family Research Council (FRC), and the American Family Association (AFA) in a national campaign to educate the public about a Disney ABC sitcom pilot based on the life of anti-religious bigot Dan Savage.

At the top of Monday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer announced Tim Tebow's return to football by proclaiming: "...one of the most popular and polarizing quarterbacks in NFL history returning to the game after three years." In another tease minutes later, fellow co-host Savannah Guthrie wondered: "Is this a second chance or a publicity stunt?"

Radical activists in the gay community have put pedal to the metal to force Gay Acceptance on Christians -- making not only their position but their tactics anti-Christian. They are deliberately targeting the Christian wedding industry – the cake-makers, the caterers, and the quaint bed-and-breakfast owners, and the like. They are head-hunting Christians who will refuse their business on moral…

One would think the editorial boards of the nations’ top newspapers – journalism’s brightest and best – wouldn't lightly throw around inflammatory language, slurs and insults. But it appears that an Indiana law protecting the religious freedom of businesses and individuals is so beyond the pale it had the journalistic high-priests at many of America’s top 20 papers sputtering “bigot,” “…

This week liberal reporters welcomed Ted Cruz to the 2016 presidential race by blasting him as "hardline," "right-wing," "radical," "dumb," "scary," "dangerous" and "slimy" -- all in the first 24 hours. And: the networks hype the "growing outrage" over Indiana's religous freedom law, with one pundit saying that Republicans who came out in support Mike Pence were having a "premature intolerance…

Filling in for Bob Schieffer as moderator of Face the Nation, CBS’s Norah O’Donnell conducted two vastly different interviews regarding multiple religious freedom laws being debate across the nation, by treating Sarah Warbelow of the Human Rights Campaign to a softball interview but repeatedly pressing former Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) over his support for such laws. 

On Sunday’s Meet the Press, an all liberal panel repeatedly took shots at the Republican Party over its support for religious freedom laws with Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report going so far as to suggest that on the issue on the issue of gay marriage “if we took everybody over the age of 50, and just moved them out of this country, this wouldn't be an issue at all.” 

UPDATE, April 6: An email sent by "Virginia Commonwealth University News" insists, despite the November 2014 tweet originally found at the link about Bryan's "GoFundMe" effort, that Alix Bryan "has not been employed by Virginia Commonwealth University." Accordingly, the text in this post's final sentence now refers to Bryan's claim in her WTVR bio and at her LinkedIn profile to have received a "…

Comedy Central hosted another one of its vicious and disgusting celebrity “roasts” with Justin Bieber as the target. On the “pre-show” before the roast, unfunny comedian Jeffrey Ross arrived in a pope costume, accompanied by sexy “nuns” in black habits and fishnet stockings. Red-carpet host Sarah Tiana introduced him as the “popemaster general” and gushed “you look amazing, you're going to be…

Media watchers in the past week rightly have criticized multiple media outlets for suddenly deciding that religious freedom needs quotation marks, as in “religious freedom.”  Leave it to the news pages of The Wall Street Journal, though, to use those quotation marks, which by their nature indicate that the very concept is in dispute, in the same story with the term gay rights published without…

Damon Root at the Hit & Run blog at Reason.com has an excellent post today taking the New York Times to task for its hypocrisy on the question of free-speech rights for corporations. 

Here's some helpful advice for newsroom assignment editors and TV producers: put Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in your address book for the next time a controversy erupts regarding a state's religious-freedom protection laws. 

Update, April 3: The Indiana man who claims to have been hacked now admits that he wasn't, but says he was "joking" about robbing Memories Pizza, and is threatening to sue those who exposed his (ahem) public comments.  Those of us following the Memories Pizza story won't have trouble remembering it as the years go by, thanks only partially to the Walkerton, Indiana store's fairly unusual name…