Culture/Society

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…

Paul J. Weber of the Associated Press made his liberal slant clear in a Wednesday article detailing how a pro-traditional marriage bill failed to pass in the Texas state legislature. Weber played up the supposedly "divisive efforts by Texas Republicans to defy the U.S. Supreme Court if same-sex marriage is legalized." He clearly labeled the proponents of the bill as conservatives, but failed to…

Last Friday, author and historian Garry Wills, who blogs occasionally at the New York Review of Books site, praised Michelle Obama for challenging, in her recent Tuskegee University commencement address, conservatives’ complacency about race in America. Specifically, Wills approved of the first lady’s “breaking all of the four rules of racial discourse the right wing now wants to enforce.” “The…

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…

Washington Post reporter Caitlin Dewey’s beat is the Internet. But her big piece on the front page of Wednesday’s Style section is about something broader: “Forsaking monogamy: The evolution of relationships has made affairs less clandestine and less combustive. And of course there are Web sites to help match tryst-seekers.” This being the Post, there is no space for critics of the "evolution"…

This has to go down as one of the most idiotic comparisons of all time.  On Sunday, Reuters posted a story trying to link the Texas biker gang shootings to the peaceful patriotic bikers making their way to the Rolling Thunder event held in Washington D.C., as they have done each Memorial Day weekend since 1988. The story headline reads, “Thousands of bikers gather in Washington to honor vets.” …

On Sunday’s Good Morning America, following a story about two long-lost sisters meeting each other for the first time while attending Columbia University, co-host Paula Faris wound up summarizing pro-life beliefs: “I love that the mom – she’s met one of the daughters – but she said, ‘I'm glad that I chose to give them a chance at life,’ too. Because she was a teen mom.”

There’s no classroom experience the libertine left supports more mightily than “sex education.” They have struggled to banish even a  whisper of a religious worldview from the classroom. Only the secular and “science-based” ideology is allowed. The Daily Beast website recently celebrated a San Francisco ruling: “Hero Judge Rules Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Is Illegal.” They have also discovered a…

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…

Time was, burning an American flag was a reliable way of getting on network TV, there to shock the taxpayers over their TV dinners. But these days, the network news programs don’t seem interested in American flag desecration, unless it happens in the Middle East. In the last five years, there have been only two mentions of domestic flag desecration on ABC, CBS and NBC. Both of those were on ABC.

Demography may not always be destiny, but according to Slate’s Jamelle Bouie, the “best bet” is that over the next decade-plus, the Republican party as a whole will move towards the center-right as young, relatively moderate voters join and elderly right-wingers shuffle off this mortal coil. In a Monday article, Bouie predicted that “eventually, the GOP will find a working national majority,…

CNN's Chris Cuomo asserted that Jeb Bush "doesn't seem to be the new Republican" on Monday's New Day, after the former Florida governor voiced his support of traditional marriage during a recent interview on CBN. Cuomo later underlined that Bush is "going to have to figure out how to please the plurality" on the marriage issue, and added that "this is not a well-calculated move on that front."

Sofia Vergara is the Spanish-accented sexpot center of attention on the ABC sitcom Modern Family. She’s also now the center of an unwanted controversy over a “modern family.” She’s fighting with an ex-fiance over two frozen embryos. Back in 2013, Vergara granted a TV interview to Dr. Oz to discuss her baby-making plans: “I’ve been very concerned about fertility and I wanted to take advantage of…

Media Research Center President Brent Bozell joined Sean Hannity on his eponymous Fox News Channel (FNC) program Thursday evening and ripped ABC for deciding to air a sitcom this fall that’s loosely based on the life of anti-religious bigot Dan Savage. The segment began with Hannity providing a brief synopsis of the upcoming show (titled The O’Neals) and highlighting how “several high-profile…