Gay marriage a threat to journalism’s future

January 11, 2012 By

Here’s something I posted last January:

I wrote yesterday about Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the diplomatic corps, in which he called for a focus on religious liberty. That didn’t get much news coverage, but guess what is! That’s right, remarks that Pope Benedict XVI didn’t even make. And such is the state of affairs in reporting on the pontiff.

Looks like it’s going to be an annual tradition! Let’s look at the headline to this week’s Reuters report about Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the Vatican diplomatic corps:

Gay marriage a threat to humanity’s future: Pope

Now, I’ve seen enough coverage of reporters to be somewhat skeptical when they say, well, anything about the Vatican. So I knew enough to look for the substantiating quote. Here’s the article’s lede:

Pope Benedict said Monday that gay marriage was one of several threats to the traditional family that undermined “the future of humanity itself.”

The pope made some of his strongest comments against gay marriage in a new year address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Vatican in which he touched on some economic and social issues facing the world today.

He told diplomats from nearly 180 countries that the education of children needed proper “settings” and that “pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman.”

So if he made such “strong” comments against same-sex marriage, why don’t any of the quotes mention same-sex marriage? Isn’t that odd? It is certainly true that he reiterated the words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew: marriage, between one and one woman, is important. But I’m pretty sure it’s not news that Pope Benedict XVI agrees with Jesus that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be news for a Vatican reporter. The rest of the article goes somewhat non-sequitur, talking about Archbishop Timothy Dolan and his support of Catholic teaching on marriage.

So where are the strong comments against same-sex marriage? Where are the words “same-sex marriage”? I mean, the headline isn’t saying that the Pope said divorce is the greatest threat. It’s not saying abstaining from marriage is the greatest threat to humanity’s future. The headline doesn’t mention polygamy. How does Reuters know that Benedict is talking specifically about same-sex marriage and not children being raised by single parents?

For supposedly strong comments on same-sex marriage, it’s kind of interesting that the quotes have to be chopped up, isn’t it?

I’d encourage you to read the actual text of Pope Benedict’s speech. He discusses civil unrest, economic problems, religious freedom and family. Here’s the shocking, strong part that demonstrates that Benedict sides with Jesus on marriage:

Blessed John Paul II stated that “the path of peace is at the same time the path of the young”, inasmuch as young people embody “the youth of the nations and societies, the youth of every family and of all humanity”. Young people thus impel us to take seriously their demand for truth, justice and peace. For this reason, I chose them as the subject of my annual World Day of Peace Message, entitled Educating Young People in Justice and Peace. Education is a crucial theme for every generation, for it determines the healthy development of each person and the future of all society. It thus represents a task of primary importance in this difficult and demanding time. In addition to a clear goal, that of leading young people to a full knowledge of reality and thus of truth, education needs settings. Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself. The family unit is fundamental for the educational process and for the development both of individuals and States; hence there is a need for policies which promote the family and aid social cohesion and dialogue. It is in the family that we become open to the world and to life and, as I pointed out during my visit to Croatia, “openness to life is a sign of openness to the future”. In this context of openness to life, I note with satisfaction the recent sentence of the Court of Justice of the European Union forbidding patenting processes relative to human embryonic stem cells, as well as the resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemning prenatal selection on the basis of sex.

That’s just one paragraph out of 11, and the only one that mentions marriage. So word to the wise: If you want to get an accurate sense of what the Pope has said, you should be sure to read his actual words in context.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Journalism, Marriage & family, World
  • Stan

    Thanks for pointing out the inaccuracy of the news stories. A lot of conservatives will be disappointed.

  • Julia

    Incredible!

  • michael

    But Mollie, reporters are not stenographers!!!!!

  • R9

    I mean, the headline isn’t saying that the Pope said divorce is the greatest threat. It’s not saying abstaining from marriage is the greatest threat to humanit

    “Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman”
    “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”

    Maybe there are other policies out there that he has in mind but gay marriage is pretty much the obvious one.

  • Bill

    The focus of the Reuters piece is not the pope’s speech, but gay marriage. (Any guess what the reporter thinks?) It’s interesting to read the reader comments on the Reuter’s site. I doubt very many read the pope’s speech.

    Why, between the Vatican refusing to get with the times and Tebow violating the separation of church and football, we’re practically living in a theocracy!

    http://denver.cbslocal.com/2012/01/10/atheist-group-believes-tebow-full-of-crap-with-public-display-of-christianity/

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    R9,
    Interesting, then, that his only specifics related to embryonic stem cells and sex-selection abortion. Rather far removed from same-sex marriage.

  • Mark Baddeley

    “Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman”
    “Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.”

    Maybe there are other policies out there that he has in mind but gay marriage is pretty much the obvious one.

    Only if you read the Pope’s words and focus on ‘man and [a] woman’. If you focus on the ‘marriage’ bit then he’s critiquing unmarried cohabitation. And if you focus on the ‘a’ – ‘a man and a woman’ then he’s opposed to polyandry of all stripes.

    As Mollie points out – he’s actually got in his guns every form of relationship that is not a marriage of a man with a woman. There’s no doubt that gay marriage is one of those. But the Catholic church is international, and not merely a western institution. His sights are set on more than our debates.

    By reducing his words to how they address one contemporary debate in our context a journalist misrepresent them. It’s the truth, but it’s not the whole truth, it’s not even the whole pertinent truth.

    And that’s before we get into the fact that this turns a fundamentally positive statement in favor of something in particular into a fundamentally negative statement about something else that is incompatible to what he is being positive about. Sure that’s an implication, but some care has to be taken to present in his words in a way he’d recognize.

  • Will

    The answering dodge will be “but it is OBVIOUS what They REALLY mean, because We KNOW what They in their heart of hearts REALLY think, and They are all interchangeable clones.”

  • Bain Wellington

    This same-sex prism is turning into an informational strait-jacket. There are other issues out there.

    In this case, the Holy Father is not exclusively or even predominantly agitated by legal recognition of same-sex unions.

    Compare, from the not-too-distant past, this part of his 2006 speech to the Roman Curia (the annual Christmas Address)

    Connected with that, finally, is also the problem of definitive decisions: can man bind himself for ever? Can he say a “yes” for his whole life? Yes, he can. He was created for this. In this very way human freedom is brought about and thus the sacred context of marriage is also created and enlarged, becoming a family and building the future.
    At this point, I cannot be silent about my concern about the legislation for de facto couples. Many of these couples have chosen this way because – at least for the time being – they do not feel able to accept the legally ordered and binding coexistence of marriage. Thus, they prefer to remain in the simple de facto state. When new forms of legislation are created which relativize marriage, the renouncement of the definitive bond obtains, as it were, also a juridical seal. In this case, deciding for those who are already finding it far from easy becomes even more difficult.
    Then there is in addition, for the other type of couple, the relativization of the difference between the sexes.
    The union of a man and a woman is being put on a par with the pairing of two people of the same sex, and tacitly confirms those fallacious theories that remove from the human person all the importance of masculinity and femininity, as though it were a question of the purely biological factor.

    These de facto relationships (originally heterosexual and only later extended to same-sex couples) are recognised in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

  • http://www.authenticbioethics.blogspot.com AuthenticBioethics

    If people can call any kind of relationship they like “marriage,” then there is no such thing as marriage. Marriage as such is under attack from many sides–even from things like an economy that requires both parents work to make ends meet, in which secular forces not friendly to religion, marriage, or family (in the form of government schools and day care) begin indoctrinating children as babies. As a Catholic with some expertise in the theology of marriage and the family, I can say for sure that the pope is not myopically singling out same-sex partnerships even if his language certainly includes it. People reveal their own focus who claim to see that focus in the pope’s words.

  • Passing By

    A general reflection on papal hradlines.

  • Martha

    R9 – divorce and its increasing ease and increasing use, cohabitation and child-bearing before/without marriage, single parenting and women having children by multiple partners (and guys don’t get off either; men having children by multiple women without marrying or committing themselves unless forced to pay child support by the courts), reproductive technologies where surrogacy means an ovum donated by one woman can be fertilised by donor sperm and implanted in the womb of another woman for the benefit of a third woman (or increasingly, for the benefit of a male couple, particularly when it comes to using Third World women as what can only be described as ‘brood mares’); embryonic stem cells and other embryonic-destructive research; the commodification of child-birth (the recent story on here about the teacher in a Catholic school who took it as her natural right that she could decide to have a child by donor insemination outside of marriage because she deliberately did not want the involvement of a man and felt she was entitled to have a baby when and how she wanted one); the alarming rise in sex-specific abortions where girls are disproportionately aborted – I could go on.

    Same-sex marriage is just one item on the list of things affecting and yes, threatening marriage as a social element.

  • michael

    I have simply given up hope on ever getting faithful reportage of what the Pope actually says from mainstream media. Long experience has taught me that you can learn precisely nothing from their coverage of papal speeches other than the fact that he gave one, which makes media coverage of the Pope useful only in the way that a traffic report is except by accident. Almost without exception, they ignore whatever the central point of his remarks may be in order to lift–and frequently distort–snippets that are relevant to the parochial interests of the journalists and the media outlets covering them. I honestly don’t know why the media don’t spare the expense and simply ignore the Pope since that is essentially what they do anyway.

  • R9

    Mark Baddeley

    It’s the word policy that I noticed. What government policies are out there (as a distinct from just social trends?) that he’s objecting to?

    Anyway it seems to me that the pope is indeed saying “gay marriage is a threat to humanity’s future”. If the argument is that he said that about some other things too and we shouldn’t focus on just one of them then, fair enough.

    Although the piece does at least say gay mariage was “one of several” threats to the family.

    The stem cell issues, that doesn’t really seem like a “makeup of the family” issue.

  • sari

    Mark #7,

    Did you mean polygamy? Polyandry refers to a woman with multiple husbands, a very rare institution cross-culturally. Polygyny refers to a man married to multiple women. Both fall under the larger heading of polygamy (one person with multiple spouses, none of whom are married to each other).

    Otherwise, I think your post is spot on.

    R9, it’s pretty clear that the Pope addressed instances where people choose to create non-traditional families (as opposed to those who’ve become non-traditional due to circumstance). The Reuters reporter had to read a lot into the Pope’s remarks before s/he could reduce the speech to a diatribe against gay marriage.

  • Mark Baddeley

    Hi R9,

    That’s a good pick-up on the word ‘policies’ in the Pope’s speech, and that that implies something more official than simply social trends. You asked

    What government policies are out there (as a distinct from just social trends?) that he’s objecting to?

    The clearest answer I could see in the text was this phrase:

    …hence there is a need for policies which promote the family…

    I would think that that would have far wider implications than simply the push for gay marriage. It might indicate a desire to have preferential tax arrangements for married couples, make divorce harder or forbid it altogether, keep the age of consent high, even encourage government policies that keep workers from working too long a working week. I’ve seen social conservatives use a phrase like ‘need for policies which promote the family’ to then segue into any of the things I just mentioned.

    Or he could have had in mind none of those things – people with an eye on Vatican ethical directives and the like (i.e. not me) might be better placed to guess.

    I’d be surprised if gay marriage wasn’t in there somewhere, but I think it’s stretching to make it the be all and end all of the issue. From the kind of perspective the Pope is coming from gay marriage simply adds to a number of policies already in existence that hinder rather than help marriage. It’ll make the problem worse on his perspective, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he sees it as a symptom of something more fundamental – the rise of non-procreational sex, fault-free divorce, even the idea of romantic love as the basic building block of marriage. I’m not saying that is the case, but there’s a number of thoughtful social conservatives around who see things in one of those ways, and the Pope would certainly fit into the ‘thoughtful’ category. And if that is going on, making it all about gay marriage distorts things.

  • Mark Baddeley

    Sari,

    ‘polygamy’. For some reason I thought that referred to the practice of multiple wives and was looking for something more gender neutral. I should have looked it up rather than gone with my memory in a field I haven’t looked into in significant depth.

  • Martha

    R9, regarding the stem-cell issues: one of the proposals put forward as to where to get the embryos to experiment upon was to use the spare embryos kept frozen in storage by fertility clinics that would otherwise only be destroyed.

    There’s a whole lot of tangles in that fact. Firstly, we’re seeing that the fertility industry (which is what it is now) has moved on from “precious gift of life” to “surplus to requirements and need to be disposed of”. There also seems to be a rise in nasty divorce disputes where frozen embryos are part of the struggle; spouse or partner A wants to implant/keep them for possible future use, partner B refuses and wants them destroyed as either she doesn’t want some other woman to have her babies or he doesn’t want to be paying child support for a baby he didn’t agree to be born.

    Some of these embryos already have a brother or sister, so we’re talking about families and what constitutes them. Is a frozen embryo a potential life only? Has it any rights, as distinct from naturally-conceived embryos, since medical intervention was necessary to create them and the participants went in with the deliberate intention of creating wanted babies to be born?

    What effect does it have on family life where children are commodities; that embryos can be frozen for convenience and may never be used for their intended end, that they can become part of a tussle between divorcing spouses, that a child or children may have unknown siblings in a clinic facility somewhere that are dependent upon parental whim as to whether or not they will be destroyed? How would it affect any child to know that they too could have met this fate?

  • SouthCoast

    Mark, the actual word for multiple wives is “polygyny”.

  • Bill

    Martha nails it. #18. Embryos have become simply human resources, to be used as coal or oil or wood pulp. (And what soul-dead creature came up with the phrase “human resources” and thought it more dignified than “personnel?”)

  • John D

    Do we really know that Pope Benedict “agrees with Jesus that marriage is the joining of one man and one woman”? The passage you cited makes it clear that words attributed to Jesus indicate a strong opposition to divorce. I’m afraid I don’t see the connection between “divorce is wrong” and “gay people can’t marry.”

    Are we even certain, considering TMatt’s recent post on attribution, that those are even Jesus’s words. Couldn’t the earlier reporter (one Matthew, no last name given, maybe he’s a blogger) have taken Mr. Jesus’s words out of context. Has Mr. Jesus been contacted to verify that he indeed said these things and meant them to have implications concerning same-sex marriage?

    This is about journalistic standards, right?

  • Mark Baddeley

    John D,

    There is a difference between an absurd argument and an argument reductio ad absurdum.

  • Dan

    Ditto what michael said in #13. Tell me, based on press reports, what the essential points Pope Benedict was making in his landmark Regensburg address. Can’t be done. Pope Benedict is, far and away, the most sophisticated and perspicacious leader on the world stage today. He will be remembered as a world historical figure. The press’s trivialization of the Pope is a huge disservice. It is a prime example of how, ultimately, journalism is superficial and crumbles to dust in the judgment of history. (If there had been a Times of Hippo back in 400 a.d., does anyone think its coverage of St. Augustine would be significant?)

  • http://ontheotherfoot.blogspot.com Joel

    But they forgot the most important element of papal reporting: a reference to priestly sex scandals. An inexcusable oversight.

  • John D

    Sure, only one paragraph (and I’m still not sure that we can be certain on agreement with that Jesus guy). Pope Benedict said:

    Among these, pride of place goes to the family, based on the marriage of a man and a woman. This is not a simple social convention, but rather the fundamental cell of every society. Consequently, policies which undermine the family threaten human dignity and the future of humanity itself.

    I think it’s pretty clear that the consensus view that he’s saying that if families are not “based on the marriage of a man and a woman” it will “threaten … the future of humanity itself.”

    Clearly, if Betty and Sue marry, raising their children, they are not a family based on the marriage of a man and a woman. Isn’t the Pope saying this will threaten the future of humanity?

    And I’ll reiterate my earlier point: that Jesus lauded heterosexual marriage and disapproved of heterosexual divorce does not indicate his opinions on same-sex marriage. Good journalists don’t put words in peoples’ mouths.

    Further, anyone claiming that a ban on same-sex marriage is required based on the interpretation of words ascribed to a religious leader is obligated to be strenuously opposed to divorce.

    Against same-sex marriage? Then you need to follow up with how divorced people should hide away in shame, not flaunting their subsequent marriages (if houses of worship were even to permit these things), and certainly deserving of limitations in legal protections.

    We know that Jesus criticized divorce. Perhaps GetReligion needs to point out that there isn’t enough coverage of the prior marriages of political figures, with the exception of Newt Gingrich.

  • Jimmy Mac

    Yawwwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnnn

  • Bain Wellington

    For a chastening comparison, here is one way of promoting marriage “as the bedrock of society” while checking all the boxes for avoiding the slur of being homophobic and generally non-empathetic with all those who choose to ignore marriage.

    This from Dr. John Sentamu, the Anglican Archbishop of York responding, in a BBC interview, to comments he had made in a speech reflecting on the well-being (or not) of children in the UK. The speech, the interview, and the newspaper report all seem to have occurred on 12 January 2012 before 9:50am, but that’s a different problem:-

    “For me, marriage is the bedrock of society and I believe still is a gift in creation where the possibility of love, the possibility of care and forgiveness stands a better chance but that doesn’t mean other arrangements are completely void of human love,” he said.

    He said he was conscious not to discriminate against other family structures. He added:

    “When I was a vicar, I said to myself, ‘Sentamu, do not actually stigmatise single-parent households, support them, be alongside them. Sentamu, do not diminish same-sex households, stand alongside them and be supportive of the raising of their children. Sentamu, do not treat co-habitees who’ve got children as if they’ve got a second-rate marriage. Sentamu do not knock marriage, support marriage because marriage is the bedrock really of society.’

    “If I didn’t believe that, I would actually be diminishing a lot of people.”

    That way you get this write-up under the favourable headline:- “Archbishop of York: marriage is still the bedrock of society”

  • Rick

    There are numerous social policies that can support or hurt families:
    – Are parents receiving just wages?
    – Is the social contribution of women who are full-time mothers recognized? In European counties it is not unusual for a woman to receive her own retirement benefits for staying home to care for chidldren or elderly parents.
    – Is there affordable health care?
    – In terms of social planning–are there places for employment, shopping and recreation in low income areas.
    –Are schools, especially in low and moderate income neighborhood, well staffed, safe and do they have a strong curriculum?
    – How easy is it for divorce to happen and are non-custodial parents required to provide sufficient financial and emotion support.

    Family social policy is a complex network of supports that helps parents to raise children. Gay marriage is a small part of that vast network.

  • Colmar

    The author of the Reuters article has answered (kind of) his critics:

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2012/jan/15/pope-speech-gay-marriage-dissect

  • http://www.getreligion.org Mollie

    Colmar,

    Thank you! The best part of his response is that he wrote another story in addition to this one. The rest I don’t find so convincing. But very glad to read his response.

  • Bain Wellington

    Pullella’s defence is largely contained in this quote from his response to Andrew Brown (which Colmar linked):-

    Whenever the Vatican says the family must be based on “marriage between a man and woman”, it is shorthand for its opposition to gay marriage, which everyone knows the church is against.

    The trouble with this is that the Church has been explicit on marriage as the union between one man and one woman since long before anyone dreamt up legal acceptance of same-sex “marriage”. The idea that “marriage between man and woman” is necessarily Vatican code for anti-gay discourse is untenable.

    For example, Leo XIII in his Encyclical Arcanum (1880) wrote:-

    [Jesus Christ] bore witness to the Jews and to His Apostles that marriage, from its institution, should exist between two only, that is, between one man and one woman

    Pius XI in his 1930 Encyclical Casti connubii(commemorating the 50th anniversary of Arcanum), wrote:-

    For each individual marriage, inasmuch as it is a conjugal union of a particular man and woman, arises only from the free consent of each of the spouses

    A generation later, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council wrote in the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et spes, 1965):-

    By their very nature, the institution of matrimony itself and conjugal love are ordained for the procreation and education of children . . Thus a man and a woman, who by their compact of conjugal love “are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19:ff), render mutual help and service to each other through an intimate union of their persons and of their actions. [n.48]

    Pullella went on to say:-

    The story said gay marriage was one of the threats to the traditional family. There is nothing shocking about this. It is the church’s traditional position.

    Whether or not it is the Church’s traditional position isn’t the point. The question is the extent to which Pullella’s report was accurate as to what the Holy Father said in his speech to the Diplomatic Corps.