Yesterday we looked at some of this week’s worst examples of some major media’s trouble covering homosexuality or same-sex marriage. It was what I was thinking about as I ruminated on a first-person essay on TheAtlantic.com headlined:

There Probably Isn’t Any Neutral Way to Report on Homosexuality
Journalists could do better at conveying the best traditionalist arguments against gay marriage. But some people won’t be satisfied unless gays are stigmatized as in bygone days.

The Atlantic piece, written by Conor Friedersdorf, is a highly personal essay about how he would run a newspaper. He argues that he’d advocate for changing marriage law, and viewing this as a “civil rights” issue — but he’d do so in a transparent manner. He sees the problem with the approach taken by some mainstream media outlets, those that share his partisan views but aren’t forthright about it, as one of failing to be honest and transparent about their grounding premises.

And, he says, he’d want to be fair to those who disagree but are not bigoted. But, he says, let’s not pretend that bigotry isn’t a driving force here:

But let’s be clear: While journalists are obligated to set forth the best arguments from all sides in their “facilitating public discourse” mode, they oughtn’t give the impression, in their “conveying reality as it is” mode, that the most thoughtful, non-bigoted arguments against gay marriage are all that’s driving the debate. It’s been some years since I went door-to-door as a beat reporter, talking to anyone I could find about gay marriage on one of the occasions that the issue flared up in California. I won’t pretend that the dozens of people I spoke to in person or the hundreds I interacted with online were a scientific sample. But suffice it to say that it is very easy to find people whose opposition to gay marriage has nothing to do with a principled commitment to preserving marriage as an institution whose primary purpose is procreation and child-rearing.

These people are cool with marriage in its modern, secularist, find-your-soul-mate-but-no-fault-divorce-just-in case incarnation. They just don’t want gays to participate. The number of people who object to gay marriage is far bigger than the number who embrace traditionalist notions of marriage. And public opinion is changing so quickly in part because encounters with real-life gays rather than stereotypes thereof tend to make many people more sympathetic to gay marriage.

You get where he’s going. I’d argue — and have argued strenuously — that sharing the fullness of the debate on this topic requires digging deep. Part of that means digging deep into the views of those who would retain marriage as a heterosexual institution.

But even in Friedersdorf’s essay we see a failure to recognize a distinction many traditionalists make between disapproval of a particular behavior and disapproval of a person. Later, Friedersdorf says he’d like to know what marriage traditionalists such as Eve Tushnet would do if they ran a style section to a newspaper. It’s an interesting choice because Tushnet is rather famously same-sex attracted and also celibate for religious reasons. One of the problems with the current media approach to this topic is how many journalists lazily prejudge any disapproval of any aspect of homosexuality with bullying, bigotry and hatred.

A correspondent, who is a journalist, had some challenging remarks in response that everyone should read:

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