Religion

Imagine a president of the United States proclaiming in his or her inaugural address, “I do not believe in God. I do not believe in a hereafter…There is no hope, save in ourselves.” If something like that ever happens, writer Jeffrey Tayler’s dream will have come true. Tayler, who routinely trashes religion for the liberal online magazine Salon, complained in a Sunday article that several recent…

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?"

As of Monday morning, ABC and NBC's morning and evening newscasts haven't aired any reports or news briefs on the recent arrests of 15 Muslim migrants from Mali, Senegal, and Ivory Coast, who allegedly murdered 12 fellow migrants by throwing them into the Mediterranean Sea – simply because they recited Christian prayers. On Friday, CBS This Morning devoted seven seconds of air time to a news…

At Mason High School in Ohio this past week, the school's administration originally supported but has now cancelled a "Covered Girl Challenge." The goal, according to a school email captured in full at Jihad Watch and almost nowhere else, was to "celebrate ... diversity and promote open mindedness" by promoting the Muslim Student Association's invitation to "all female students to ... wear a…

Laurie Goodstein spotlighted that "the Vatican abruptly ended its takeover of the main leadership group of American nuns" in a Thursday article for the New York Times. Goodstein played up that the final report of the supposed "takeover" was a "far cry from three years ago, when the Vatican's doctrinal office...issued a report finding that the [nuns] had 'serious doctrinal problems.' It said the…

This was ugly.  On his MSNBC show this evening, Chris Matthews criticized Jeb Bush, who will be speaking at Liberty University, for "stooping" to "that evangelical crowd"   Let's play some political madlibs and imagine that instead of "stooping to that evangelical crowd," Matthews had criticized a candidate who spoke at an Islamic center for "stooping to that Muslim crowd."  Cue the cries of…

As the Big Three networks were touting President Obama's claim that climate change affects the health of children – including that of his own daughter – on Wednesday, their morning and evening newscasts have yet to report on the politician's criticism of many Christians during a Tuesday prayer breakfast. Mr. Obama underlined that "on Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am…

I hadn't before seen Will Leitch, the Deadspin creator who now writes on politics for Bloomberg, in action.  But on today's With All Due Respect, I found him funny and affable. Even so, he made one left-leaning assertion so absurd it was too much even for show host John Heilemann.  Running parallel with the NCAA tourney, Bloomberg has been running a bracket of 64 non-presidential candidates.  In…

On Holy Saturday, The Washington Post took an old Sally Quinn interview (posted 36 days earlier, on February 27) so they could rip Christians on Easter weekend for their allegedly persistent anti-Semitism. Not the Muslims – no, the Christians. The original headline was “Jesus Was a Jew — Get Over It: A Q&A with award-winning writer James Carroll on how Christians misunderstand Jesus.”…

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 "…

On the front page of the New York Times sat "Religion Laws Quickly Fall Into Retreat," a label-heavy (14 "conservative" labels) 1,500-word story on Indiana's controversial religious freedom law. The Times' coverage has also been consistently slanted with both that labeling bias and scare quotes surrounding the term "religious freedom."

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…