Marriage & family

Woman abuses blog; anti-abortionists hardest hit

June 15, 2009 By Douglas LeBlanc

Kim Janssen of the Chicago Tribune did a generally solid job with a delicate topic on Friday, telling the story of a woman who blogged about having a baby with Trisomy 13, then losing the baby to death soon afterward. This pregnancy, although fictional, drew on what blogger Beccah Beushausen said was her previous loss of a baby under similar circumstances.

The most poignant remarks from Beushausen, who blogged under the pseudonyms of “B” and “April’s Mom,” are about the seductive power of blogging:

Beushausen said she really did lose a son shortly after birth in 2005. She started her blog in March to help deal with that loss and to express her strong anti-abortion views, she said.

She had expected only a handful of friends to read it, but when her first post got 50 comments, she was hooked.

“I’ve always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear,” Beushausen said.

“Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand,” she said. “I didn’t know how to stop. … One lie led to another.”

Two things about Janssen’s story are frustrating. First, rather than going into the detail of Trisomy 13, Janssen describes the imaginary child only as “diagnosed as terminally ill in the womb.” Part of the drama of Beushausen’s story was her claim that, because the baby had Trisomy 13, “we were told to terminate.”

My second frustration is that Janssen describes the blog as misleading “thousands of abortion opponents,” with no reference to anyone else being misled by it.

Is there any way to know how many fans of the blog were drawn to it entirely because of its messages about abortion? Even the cached version of April’s Mom provided by the Tribune undermines that description. The largest art consists of glurge-drenched photos that mostly link to ads: Diaper decorations called RuffleButts, a bow boutique known as MissyPrissy and a sonogram image that’s labeled “April Rose.” The editorial content is of the same flavor.

Another cached version of the blog promotes a hair bow that benefits a crisis pregnancy center, and shows a color photo of a pregnant woman’s torso, labeled “April’s Mom.” As pro-life activism goes, this is tame stuff.

The adjectival use of anti-abortion is inescapable in stories about abortion protests. In this story, it’s about as tone-deaf as the infamous Tyson Homosexual and anti-abortion opera stories. Even pro-natalist — once attributed to the barbaric reign of Nicolai Ceausescu — would be an improvement.

Filed Under: Marriage & family, Politics, Sex, Social Issues

Stories have more than one side

June 9, 2009 By mollie

A few years ago, Los Angeles Times editor John Carroll sent a memo to all section editors expressing his concern that the paper had covered a story about abortion in a remarkably one-sided manner:

I’m no expert on abortion, but I know enough to believe that it presents a profound philosophical, religious and scientific question, and I respect people on both sides of the debate. A newspaper that is intelligent and fair-minded will do the same.

I thought of that while reading a “Column One” story in the Times about Dr. Warren Hern, a Colorado abortion doctor known for performing late-term abortions. As I mentioned a few days ago, with the murder of late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, stories about the practice of late-term abortion, the women who seek them and the doctors who perform them are important. Unfortunately, the Times story, written by DeeDee Correll, was really nothing much more than a puff piece:

Reporting from Boulder, Colo. — At the Boulder Abortion Clinic, Dr. Warren Hern leaves no window uncovered.

Full-length blinds shroud the bulletproof entryway; in his office, vinyl shades block a small window.

This is one of the facts of Hern’s life — no windows, ever. That was how Dr. Barnett Slepian’s killer shot him in upstate New York, through a kitchen window. Slepian, like Hern, performed abortions.

“I can’t sit in front of an open window. The shades have to be drawn,” Hern said.

After Slepian’s shooting in 1998, Hern predicted another would follow. “Will I get to live out my life?” he asked in a newspaper column in 2001. “. . . Who’s next?”

It’s a provocative story and the Hern perspective is well written, as the lede indicates. But that last quote gives a hint at what’s missing from the story. He asks if he’ll get to live out his life. Later we learn:

Hern has been familiar with the hazards for decades. After performing abortions for more than half of his life, the 70-year-old doctor has never been injured, but the constant threats with which he has lived since 1973 have transformed his life into a series of security measures: sleeping with a rifle, scanning rooftops for snipers, wearing a protective vest.

“It ruins your life,” Hern said.

Speaking of ruined lives . . . nowhere in the story do we learn anything substantive about why Hern is reviled or considered controversial. We learn nothing about the abortions he performs or why people oppose them. When Stephanie Simon wrote about late-term abortion doctors for the Wall Street Journal, she included some information about what, exactly, late-term abortion doctors do:

Late-term abortions also are grueling. In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on one late-term procedure, sometimes called “partial-birth abortion,” in which the physician begins to deliver the fetus, feet-first, then punctures its skull. Doctors are still allowed to dismember the fetus in utero. Dr. Tiller’s preferred method is also legal. He stopped the fetal heart with an injection of digoxin, a drug used to treat adult heart patients. Then he would induce labor. Patients said they would wait in hotel rooms through two to three days of contractions until they were ready to deliver their stillborns at his clinic.

Such procedures discomfit some abortion doctors. William F. Harrison, who performs abortions in Fayetteville, Ark., said he considered Dr. Tiller a friend and called him “a very brave and great doctor.” Yet he has long expressed concern about Dr. Tiller’s willingness to abort into the ninth month. “Some of his practices are hard to defend,” Dr. Harrison said.

It’s such a simple thing to do, including details about the work of late-term abortion doctors. To speak repeatedly about Dr. Hern’s life without filling readers in on any details about how he has ended the lives of untold thousands of fetuses is just odd. If Column One is supposed to be an unreflective puff piece, that’s one thing. But if it’s supposed to treat contentious issues as complex and challenging, this one just failed.

Filed Under: Journalism, Marriage & family, People, Politics, Social Issues

Moving past the bumper stickers

June 6, 2009 By mollie

Following the murder of prominent late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, gunned down in the foyer of his church, many mainstream media outlets have run articles about the controversial practice of late-term abortions and the doctors who perform them. This is a good thing. On a public policy issue as heated as late-term abortion, it’s good to provide readers with more information about the practice and who is involved.

Let’s look at some of the stories. Here’s Stephanie Simon of the Wall Street Journal, with a very balanced article on the topic. She somehow manages to move her sources beyond the “bumper sticker” level of discourse to get some meaningful quotes from both sides about the difficulty of the issue. She includes an anecdote from people who chose a late-term abortion after learning that their unborn child had a fatal form of dwarfism but she also speaks with someone who decided to continue with her pregnancy after a different fatal fetal diagnosis. The article helps show the issue’s complexity. It’s a really good story for everyone to read — no matter your views on the topic.

But Simon’s story, published a few days ago, is what got me thinking about the way some of the “facts” surrounding late-term abortion are reported. First and foremost, I’d like a definition of what constitutes late-term abortion. We use that phrase all the time but I rarely see it defined. A separate Wall Street Journal story reports that nearly 90 percent of abortions are conducted during the first trimester of pregnancy with just more than one percent conducted after 21 weeks. Simon’s story says that it’s fewer than 1 percent that are conducted late in the second or during the third trimester. When does the “late-term” of “late-term abortions” begin?

Or note that Simon writes that “perhaps 1,000 [abortions] a year” are performed in the late second or third trimesters. But that other Wall Street Journal story says:

Stanley Henshaw, a senior fellow at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health-research group, told WaPo that 2001 data from 15 states and New York City suggest that as many as 2,400 abortions were performed after 24 weeks in the U.S. that year. But Henshaw said that number might have come down because there are fewer abortion providers now.

Perhaps they did decline some 60 percent in a couple years but, if so, an explanation might be in order.

Or note something about the paragraph below where Simon does her best to explain the reasons women might get a late-term abortion:

Nearly all the late-term abortions at Dr. Tiller’s clinic involved fetuses that were deformed or disabled in some way, said Peggy Bowman, who worked at the clinic as a top aide to Dr. Tiller for a decade. …

Dr. Tiller also took some late-term patients with healthy fetuses. Though the clinic’s medical records typically remain confidential, he said they were only the most desperate cases: very young girls, victims of rape, drug addicts, women in abusive relationships.

It struck me that all of this is self reported. We’re relying on one side — perhaps there’s no other option — for information about one of the most contentious topics in public debate.

The Washington Post‘s look at late-term abortions basically just quotes two other famous late-term abortion doctors (Warren Hern and Leroy Carhart) with an assist from the National Abortion Federation’s Vicky Saporta. The trio make a number of contentious claims about women who come for abortions after their fetuses are viable. And rather than speak with a doctor or three who specialize in helping women bring to term children with fetal abnormalities, we get a response from Operation Rescue, a group that doesn’t exactly represent mainstream pro-life thinking. However, the story, by reporter Rob Stein, does a fantastic job of explaining just how sketchy the data on late-term abortions are. I thank him for that. He was also one of the few reporters to actually investigate how many abortion doctors perform late-term abortions. While many media outlets reported that Tiller was one of only two or three doctors to do them, Stein reports that a survey of a couple thousand abortion practices from a few years ago found 18 clinics and 12 hospitals reported performing late abortions.

But there are some holes as well. The story begins with a heartbreaking account:

When Susan Fitzgerald went in for a routine ultrasound near the end of her pregnancy, she was expecting good news. Instead, she was stunned to learn that the fetus had a rare condition that left his bones so brittle he would live less than a day.

“It was unbelievable,” Fitzgerald said. “You think by the third trimester you’re home free. It was devastating.”

Desperate to end the pregnancy, she flew from her home in New England to Wichita, where George Tiller was one of the few doctors in the country willing to perform an abortion so late in a pregnancy.

“It was very difficult, but I knew it was the most humane thing I could do for my baby,” Fitzgerald said. “It was absolutely the right thing to do. I’m just so grateful that Dr. Tiller was there for me.”

The name of the condition is not included in the story. Later we learn:

Under Kansas law, an abortion can be performed after a fetus is viable only if the doctor performing the procedure and an independent physician agree that the woman’s life is at risk or that continuing the pregnancy would cause “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function.”

Many are performed in cases such as Fitzgerald’s, where a major abnormality in the fetus is discovered late, Saporta and others said.

And while Stein’s article doesn’t mention how Tiller performed abortions, Simon’s article did:

Late-term abortions also are grueling. In 2007, the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on one late-term procedure, sometimes called “partial-birth abortion,” in which the physician begins to deliver the fetus, feet-first, then punctures its skull. Doctors are still allowed to dismember the fetus in utero. Dr. Tiller’s preferred method is also legal. He stopped the fetal heart with an injection of digoxin, a drug used to treat adult heart patients. Then he would induce labor. Patients said they would wait in hotel rooms through two to three days of contractions until they were ready to deliver their stillborns at his clinic.

Okay, so after reading a number of articles on late-term abortion and the doctors who perform them, I’m left wondering a few things. How is it legal to abort an unborn child post-viability in Kansas on account of fetal abnormality or genetic defect? In other stories, Tiller says he’s conducted abortions on account of women being in abusive relationships. How is that legal? And while I understand the sensitivity of the topic of pregnancy and abortion (as I write this, I’m holding my daughter who just a month ago was a “late-term” fetus), I wonder if the reporter could include a bit of an explanation as to why the mother felt it better to fly to Kansas to have a doctor stop the heart of her unborn child and deliver him as a stillborn rather than wait for the few remaining weeks of her pregnancy and deliver him? She says she knows that she did the “right thing.” I can’t help but think that deserves a follow-up question and that the answer to that follow-up question would have merited the type of quote that Stephanie Simon gets in her stories.

I’m all for including the stories of women who have undergone late-term abortions but I’m not sure how much these anecdotes are adding to the debate. I feel like there’s this assumption that of course any woman who discovers her child has a fatal abnormality would of course consider ending his life. But as we saw in that fascinating story by Julia Duin a few weeks back, many women don’t terminate their pregnancies when they discover their unborn children have problems.

I also feel as if there’s this assumption about the vast majority of Americans who oppose late-term abortions that they just don’t understand that the women who request them are experiencing difficulties. And yet I think that assumption is probably unwise. Maybe it’s just because I’m a woman, maybe it’s just because I have a mother, maybe it’s just because I know women (perhaps you, too, fit into one or more of these categories!) … but perhaps this debate is not one that could be settled if we all realized that fetal abnormalities are heartbreaking and that pregnancy is difficult. It’s possible to sympathize with women who are carrying fetuses with abnormalities without believing that terminating their lives is just or that the practice should be legal. Simon’s story does a good job of getting that and helping the two sides speak to each other. Most other mainstream accounts, sadly, did not.

Filed Under: Godbeat, Journalism, Marriage & family, People, Politics, Social Issues

Can you top (less) this?

June 4, 2009 By pastorliz

Wednesday Mollie looked at a story from CNN.com about an odd encounter between a shop-keeper and a would-be robber. It wasn’t clear exactly what, if anything, actually happened during the meeting.

Spurred by the thought that I might find one as weird as Mollie’s, I jumped when reader Adam sent GetReligion an Associated Press story hot off the wires proving that “sin” still sells — or at least percolates. Here is another tale that leaves the reader begging for more: that of a topless coffeehouse that burned to the group a few nights ago, apparently a victim of arson. Situated in Vassalboro, Maine (the name itself is worth an article), the cafe and its shirt-free waitstaff had been controversial since it opened in February (apparently not every small town in the state has one).

The story opens in a straightforward fashion. It’s not until the middle, when the writer interviews owner Donald Crabtree, that things get a little confusing.

Crabtree said he’s determined to reopen his business.

“I’ll keep going. … I’ve got some girls out of work and I’m going to do all I can to get in there,” Crabtree said.

The shop’s opening in February raised the ire of dozens of residents. Someone recently called police to complain that a waitress was outside the business without a shirt. An ordinance was proposed to regulate nudity at local businesses.

Where was the ordinance proposed? Didn’t the town have any rules regulating nudity before — or was the opening of a topless coffee bar something the “Town Fathers” never envisioned?
Were any churches or religious organizations involved in trying to get the cafe shut down — or at least get the waitresses to wear shirts when the weather got cold?

Then there’s a quote from a Richard Flick (otherwise undentified) arguing that 97 percent of the townspeople probably opposed the coffehouse. Say that was the case. Who were the patrons?

But the most mysterious quote comes at the end, when Vassalboro resident Sherry Perry says: “I’m a believer and I’m a Christian and I don’t want this trash in my backyard. No good can come from it.”

A “believer and a Christian?” Sherry, what is it you believe in? Either reproter Glenn Adams didn’t ask her, or the editor chopped off the story at that point. Without more context about local and state “decency” laws, the possible opposition from local faith groups, and how Ms. Adams identifies herself, readers might get the idea that there’s some odd happenings going on Maine.

Filed Under: Marriage & family, Pop Culture, Sex, Social Issues

Family + friends + faith equals …

June 3, 2009 By TMatt

atlantichappiness One of the best things about making a 9-hour flight on an airliner is that it gives you enough time to read an issue of Atlantic Monthly. Thus, on the way to Kiev, I finally got to read the stunning “What Makes Us Happy?” cover story by Joshua Wolf Shenk.

The subtitle to that headline is an important one, seeing has how it has to lure the reader into consuming a 11,526-word piece of magazine journalism: “Friends matter. Cholesterol doesn’t. Lessons from an amazing 72-year study.”

I called the article stunning, not so much in what it reveals, but how it reveals it. You want to read this article. Trust me.

Yet, at the same time, there is a giant, gaping hole in the middle of the piece — literally a hole in the soul. I’m going to try to write a short post about this that will encourage you to wade into this long, long article about the Harvard Study of Adult Development. Here’s the crucial information that gets us rolling:

The project is one of the longest-running — and probably the most exhaustive — longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse — and now well into retirement — the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews. The files holding the data are as thick as unabridged dictionaries. They sit in a wall of locked cabinets in an office suite behind Fenway Park in Boston, in a plain room with beige carpeting and fluorescent lights that is littered with the detritus of many decades of social-scientific inquiry: a pile of enormous spreadsheet data books; a 1970s-era typewriter; a Macintosh PowerBook, circa 1993. All that’s missing are the IBM punch cards used to analyze the data in the early days.

For 42 years, the psychiatrist George Vaillant has been the chief curator of these lives, the chief investigator of their experiences, and the chief analyst of their lessons. His own life has been so woven into the study — and the study has become such a creature of his mind — that neither can be understood without the other.

Some of the anonymous men involved in the study have openly discussed their participation, such as former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. Study leaders have also stated that a young Harvard man named John F. Kennedy was another subject whose life was studied until his untimely death.

The article is built around italicized excerpts from the case-study files, offering insights into these anonymous men worthy of fine fiction. It is also clear that, in the end, one of the goals of this article goals is to find out, well, if Vaillant is himself a happy, healthy and fulfilled man. I will not reveal anything about the plot of that drama.

marriagehands It’s clear that stability and fidelity are crucial, especially in terms of family and friendships. It really, really helps to have a solid, happy marriage. And did I mention fidelity? That seems to be a crucial factor linked to mental and physical health, which is interesting for a study of men who came of age just ahead of the Sexual Revolution (or who wrestled with mid-life pains in the midst of that moral earthquake).

But wait. Might there be another crucial happiness factor, producing a trinity of family, friendships and, well, faith? The article does offer this:

… (H)appiness scientists have come up with all kinds of straightforward, and actionable, findings: that money does little to make us happier once our basic needs are met; that marriage and faith lead to happiness (or it could be that happy people are more likely to be married and spiritual); that temperamental “set points” for happiness — a predisposition to stay at a certain level of happiness — account for a large, but not overwhelming, percentage of our well-being. (Fifty percent, says Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness. Circumstances account for 10 percent, and the other 40 percent is within our control.) But why do countries with the highest self-reports of subjective well-being also yield the most suicides? How is it that children are often found to be a source of “negative affect” (sadness, anger) — yet people identify children as their greatest source of pleasure?

So marriage and faith lead to happiness? They are crucial factors? What if those factors are turned upside down? Does the study reveal anything else about the faith factor?

No.

At least, this article does not contain another word of substance on that issue, other than a few references to church attendance. If you are looking for the role of faith and spirituality in human happiness, this is not the article for you.

I really, really miss Michael Kelly.

Filed Under: Academia, Marriage & family, People, Religion, Science

Something akin to a Catholic

May 30, 2009 By TMatt

We are getting closer and loser to an official mainstream-press language to describe the religious background of Judge Sonia Sotomayor and, to no one’s surprise, the issue that continues to drive this slow process of journalistic revelation is abortion.

At this point, however, no one wants to get into the confusing and controversial work of determining the identities of the Catholic judges on the U.S. Supreme Court, as opposed to the “Catholic” judges. After all, this would require listing the Catholic judges who support America’s current regime of abortion laws and then listing the Catholic judges who want to see abortion severely restricted or banned. That would raise doctrinal questions.

You see, it’s all about judicial mathematics. Here is a typical CNN reference:

Sotomayor was raised Catholic. If she is confirmed, six out of the nine justices on the high court will be from the faith. Catholics make up about 25 percent of the U.S. population. Of the 110 people who have served on the Supreme Court, 11 have been Catholic. Five of those justices — Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts — are currently on the court.

Notice the crucial words “raised” and “from.” Is someone who is “from” the Catholic Church a Catholic, as opposed to someone who is “in” the Catholic Church? Now that I think of it, which justices in the current gang of five are “from” the Catholic faith? Anyone care to name names?

Meanwhile, over at the Washington Post, we have the following language in a crucial news report in which the White House urgently assured leaders on the cultural left that Sotomayor is not a Justice David Souter in reverse. In other words, Democrats don’t make mistakes.

But it’s hard to stress that the nominee is a complex, nuanced moderate on abortion while also stressing that she is totally in line with the White House on its uncompromising support for abortion rights at all points during a pregnancy. Thus, we have this:

Facing concerns about the issue from supporters rather than detractors, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama did not ask Sotomayor specifically about abortion rights during their interview. But Gibbs indicated that the White House is nonetheless sure she agrees with the constitutional underpinnings of Roe v. Wade, which 36 years ago provided abortion rights nationwide.

And then we have this:

The abortion issue is likely to arise in Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings in July, in part because of her background as a Catholic. But she is unlikely to offer any more clarity than have previous nominees. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., for instance, ducked the question during his 2005 hearings by saying that Roe is “settled as a precedent of the court.”

And finally this, linked to Sotomayor rulings in the past:

… (In) cases involving deportation to China, she has written about the country’s sterilization and forced abortion standards. In one case, she talked about how husbands would be affected: “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child.”

The question, in other words, is whether Sotomayor is a practicing Catholic or a person of Catholic cultural background who is, in effect, someone who is akin to being a Catholic.

Stay tuned. At some point, some reporter is going to dare to ask this question to people who might know.

Filed Under: Catholicism, Journalism, Marriage & family, Politics, Social Issues

Framing the issue

May 28, 2009 By mollie

frame This week the California State Supreme Court revealed its decision regarding Proposition 8, the ballot initiative limiting marriage to a union of one man and one woman. Californians had passed the initiative and opponents had filed suit against it. The court arguments were televised which meant that no one was particularly surprised by the ruling, which the Washington Post‘s Keith Richburg writes up here:

The ruling Tuesday by California’s Supreme Court upholding a ban on same-sex marriages shows that, despite a year of successes for gay activists, the road toward full marriage rights remains difficult — particularly when voters are given a direct say.

The decisions in three states this year to legalize same-sex marriage, and the possibility that three others will soon follow suit, created a sense that the issue was gaining irreversible momentum and widespread acceptance, with many advocates making comparisons to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But the California ruling served as a reminder that same-sex marriage remains deeply polarizing, and the movement is likely to see more reversals and setbacks as it tries to expand beyond the favorable terrain of the Northeast.

Of all the interesting things about the way the mainstream media portray the debate over same-sex marriage, the above paragraphs demonstrate the importance of framing.

For instance, it’s true that in the last few months, three states have legalized same-sex marriage and others may soon follow suit. But it’s also true that in the last few months three states passed initiatives outlawing same-sex marriage and that they joined 30 others who had already done so.

Or what is this language about ‘creating a sense that gay marriage was inevitable.’ That’s only true because the media have been creating that sense. When a beauty pageant contestant is in the middle of a media firestorm for articulating a view of marriage and marriage policy shared by a majority of Americans including President Barack Obama; when articulating the view that marriage should be defined as it always has been — no matter what its variances — as a heterosexual institution is grounds for public shaming by the cultural elite; when the many victories of traditional marriage proponents are simply ignored . . .

The article goes on using the framework of how the Supreme Court ruling affects proponents of same-sex marriage — and not how it affects the majority of Americans who oppose same-sex marriage. It’s just an interesting choice, particularly on the same day that this Gallup Poll came out showing that the media-promulgated view of the inevitability of same-sex marriage might just be a fabrication of the media. From the Washington Post‘s web site and written up by Chris Cillizza:

On the heels of a decision by California’s Supreme Court to uphold a ban on gay marriage in the Golden State comes polling data from USA Today/Gallup that contradicts the conventional wisdom that a majority of the American public is moving closer to acceptance of same-sex unions.

Asked whether “marriages between same-sex couples” should or shouldn’t be “recognized by the law as valid”, 40 percent of the sample said those unions should be valid while 57 percent said they should not.

Those number are essentially unchanged from a May 2008 Gallup survey but less optimistic for proponents of gay marriage than a May 2007 poll in which 46 percent said same sex marriages should be valid while 53 percent said they should not.

The USA Today/Gallup survey also asked whether “allowing two people of the same sex to marry” would change change society for the better, the worse or have no effect. Thirteen percent said it would make things better, 48 percent said it would make things worse and 36 percent said allowing gay people to marry would have no effect on society.

It’s fascinating that the plurality of Americans who reported in this poll that same-sex marriage would make things worse for society — and the majorities who routinely vote to define marriage as a heterosexual institution — aren’t given a voice in the media. They consistently express their views and yet are routinely derided by, marginalized in or ignored by the media. Why?

Filed Under: Journalism, Marriage & family, People, Politics

Lowest common denominations?

May 26, 2009 By pastorliz

This has been a big day for news, has it not? In Washington, D.C., President Obama nominated (see tmatt’s post) a woman who could be the first Hispanic ( which has prompted some debate over why Benjamin Cardozo didn’t count) and the third woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

In California, the Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8, the ban on gay marriage. The Court upheld the legality of the marriages performed between last May (when the same court upheld the legality of same-sex marriage) and November, when the proposition banning it passed. One safe bet — religious spokespeople on the right and the left will have something to say. How good journalists are in identifying the players remains to be seen.

I have a quibble with a few things about the New York Times referenced above, but I also recognize that it’s really the “first edition” of an story that will continue to reverbrate in the media as opponents and proponents react to the ban.

The California Supreme Court upheld a ban on same-sex marriage today, ratifying a decision made by voters last year that runs counter to a growing trend of states allowing the practice.

The decision, however, preserves the 18,000 marriages performed between the court’s decision last May that same-sex marriage was lawful and the passage by voters in November of Proposition 8, which banned it. Supporters of the proposition argued that the marriages should no longer be recognized.

Do three state decisions for gay marriage and three possibles (all except for Iowa in the Northeast) constitute a “growing trend”? Is this the beginning of a tidal wave or a Left and Right Coast phenomenon? A few paragraphs into the story, John Schwartz underscores his “trend” assertion by referring to a recent poll:

At the same time, attitudes of Americans toward same-sex marriage favor liberalization of the practice. In an April CBS/New York Times poll, 42 percent of those surveyed favored same-sex marriage, up from 21 percent at election time in 2004, when it was a wedge issue during the presidential campaign. That poll suggests the trend will continue into the future: 57 percent of the respondents favored legal recognition for same-sex marriage, compared with 31 percent of respondents over the age of 40.

The data he quotes from this one poll suggest not that all Americans favor ‘liberalizing’ marriage but that support for same-sex marriage has grown, particularly among those under 30. What explains this apparent dramatic surge between 2004 and 2009? The reporter doesn’t explain, nor does he indentify the actual questions asked.

More puzzling for those who want to track ongoing developments among California clergy and laypeople is this paragraph from a story on today’s Los Angeles Times website.

But gay marriage advocates captured a wide array of support in the case, with civil rights groups, legal scholars and even some churches urging the court to overturn the measure. Supporters of the measure included many churches and religious organizations.

It wouldn’t be remarkable if a Unitarian Universalist congregation supported gay marriage — if a Southern Baptist congregation came out for it, that would be news! What churches is Dolan talking about? Paragraphs like this are safe, because they are so vague, but tell you absolutely nothing.

Of the early stories I’ve seen, I like the detailed one on the Washington Post website the best. It was posted two or three hours later than the other ones, meaning that the writer had more time to gather quotes and statements. Writer Ashley Surdin pays a lot of attention to the legal reasoning and implications of the ruling. She also has more quotes (as one might expect) from those who are angry about the judgment than those who are please. But she does include a statement from the Mormons and notes that many “conservative” denominations and politicians were involved in support for Proposition 8.

Where is the “religious left”? Perhaps they will be heard from in days to come. In fact, I suspect that religious voices will once again become prominent in the gay marriage debate in California — as proponents do not, by any measure, consider this a done deal. It’s unfair to judge all coverage by what one sees on the first day — since so many Prop 8 supporters were driven by religious convictions (and possibly many on the other side) that is a story that deserves to continue to be covered.