By DEXTER DUGGAN
Exactly ten years before the dominant media’s enmity exploded against Indiana’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Act as Holy Week arrived at the end of March, there had been another media storm carrying over into Holy Week at the end of March 2005.
A disabled Florida woman, Terri Schiavo, was being agonizingly starved and dehydrated to death as her estranged husband wanted, and the dominant media judged this to be wonderfully fine. She was an unwanted burden to his future.
Any other consideration was irrelevant in these media’s calculus in 2005, including the fact that the faithless husband, though still married to her, fathered two children while living with another woman. Crucially missing was any verification that Terri wanted to be put to death.
Her family of birth pleaded that they be allowed to care for her, but they were rejected by a legal establishment intent on euthanasia.
“Women’s rights,” then as now, proved to be no more than hollow media spin, a tool employed as judged useful. The media mill that ground down opposition saw no reason for this vulnerable disabled woman to have her life, and the right to it, respected.
Then as now, dominant media prejudices and biases crested in furious gales of distortion, misinformation, manufactured slants, and other poisonous propaganda.
Coincidentally, it’s the same hostile media climate that conservative politicians face every day across the nation. They either can please leftist media by sending out messages that chill the majority of the electorate in a center-right nation, or they can stand up for majority views that leave the media machine seething and determined to cut those candidates down however possible.
One need look no further for evidence than the negative treatment of pro-life conservative Republicans by national media as contrasted with the still reverentially tailored reporting toward Barack Obama, a callous serial liar, conniver, grim lawbreaker, and radical pro-abortion Democrat.
The suffering of countless helpless babies being torn apart by permissive abortion isn’t worth a moment’s glance to these editors, but any perceived discomfort or complaint of left-wing activists not only receives prolonged, major, solicitous attention, but is allowed to dictate the very way the issue is covered.
Conservative commentator Rich Lowry certainly wasn’t reflecting the viewpoint of allegedly neutral newsrooms when he observed on March 31: “The anti-Indiana backlash is a perfect storm of hysteria and legal ignorance, supercharged by the particularly censorious self-righteousness of the left.”
Indiana had joined 19 other states by having a law that was inspired by a federal version of the legislation signed by no less than liberal Democrat President Bill Clinton in 1993.
But 1993 was well before the liberals’ culture warriors decided they had to pummel, sue, and bankrupt into submission anyone who dared to defend themselves from social cancers as concocted in the laboratories of Democrats’ Dr. Frankensteins in the second decade of the 21st century.
Currently prominent is “gay marriage” and the demand that all celebrate it. It’s not enough that a business serve homosexual clients or even count them as friends. The business owner, like Washington state Christian florist Barronelle Stutzman, must attend the “gay marriage” ceremony itself and provide full on-site solicitude to the clients.
Despite the political left’s big “talk of diversity,” said commentator Lowry, “it demands unanimity on this question — individual conscience be damned. So it isn’t bothered when religious wedding vendors are sued or harassed under antidiscrimination laws for their nonparticipation in ceremonies they morally oppose.
“[T]he mere possibility that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act might protect a baker opposed to gay marriage is enough to create a furious, unhinged reaction,” he said.
Apparently unimpressed by the national propaganda against Indiana, the Arkansas legislature approved its own RFRA on March 31 and sent it over for the governor’s expected signature. However, apparently feeling the media heat, Gov. Asa Hutchinson on April 1 asked legislators to revise the wording.
As potential Republican presidential candidates position themselves for 2016, the political implications were obvious. Would they cower before the feline caterwauls of the dominant media, or align themselves with voter sentiment?
On March 30 The Hill political website said prominent GOP hopefuls Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, former Gov. Jeb Bush, and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, and, to a lesser extent, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin supported the Indiana law. The Hill didn’t list the stands of all GOP presidential possibilities. The New York Daily News said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and retired neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson also backed the law.
The Hill quoted Bush as saying on the March 30 Hugh Hewitt radio program: “This is simply allowing people of faith space to be able to express their beliefs, to have, to be able to be people of conscience. I just think once the facts are established, people aren’t going to see this as discriminatory at all.
“There are many cases where people acting on their conscience have been castigated by the government,” the Bush quotation continued.
“And this law simply says the government has to have a level of burden to be able to establish that there’s been some kind of discrimination. We’re going to need this. This is really an important value for our country, too, in a diverse country, where you can respect and be tolerant of people’s lifestyles, but allow for people of faith to be able to exercise theirs.”
This was a deviation from the image Jeb Bush has been cultivating in recent years as a “moderate” who wins media admiration. Bush was Florida governor when Terri Schiavo was put to death in 2005. After making some efforts on her behalf — which many pro-lifers regarded as inadequate — he began positioning himself as less conservative after his term expired in January 2007, with a possible White House run in his future.
Amid all the current hostility to the RFRA by social liberals and the media, they already seemed to have forgotten that it was barely yesterday when even strong liberal Democrats like Obama and Hillary Clinton opposed “same-sex marriage.” In 2012 Obama said he changed his mind.
Thus today, when a business owner says his view against honoring “gay marriage” is based on thousands of years of tradition and Scripture, this owner is to be hounded through the courthouse as a major lawbreaker, while a leftist whose support for “gay marriage” goes back only a few dozen months is hailed as a paragon of goodness.
How about this: Let’s see if this newly dictated morality lasts 50 years, much less 5,000 years, before judging Obama to be morally superior to a conscientious traditional Christian or Jew.
Businesses generally make money by selling their goods. That’s simply sensible. If a man wearing a T-shirt and shorts, or a business suit and tie, stops at a shop to buy cakes or pies, the baker doesn’t care a whit about the customer’s views on religion, politics, or astrology — just the color of his money.
Maybe he’s a Wall Street broker or a Little League coach, maybe a homosexual activist, maybe a Ku Klux Klan wizard. But if he’s just wearing ordinary clothes and not intent on proselytizing for identity politics, the baker could care less.
If the customer wants to buy some colored icing and take it home to decorate his store-bought cake, that’s between him and his hungry toddler and dog in the kitchen doorway.
However, if the customer tells the baker to decorate the cake for a Ku Klux Klan party, questions arise. Let’s see, you need to use some chocolate color for the slave’s body hanging from the tree, and some nice coconut cream for the Klansmen in their robes, dragging in another slave.
Could even social liberals and the dominant media not comprehend why the baker should be allowed to turn this customer down flat? That the Klansman should have absolutely no power to compel the baker to fill this order?
But, oh, the liberals say, hanging slaves is bad, but “gay marriage” is good and desirable. That’s the difference.
Well now, four years ago Obama and Clinton among many others said “gay marriage” was wrong. Let’s wait more than a few dozen months before saying the Christian baker has become so morally bad, he has to be fined into bankruptcy and driven out of business.
Just after the Germanwings jetliner with 149 other people was crashed into the Alps on March 24 by an apparently unstable copilot, the German news magazine Der Spiegel ran a chilling cover picture that, a few weeks earlier, wouldn’t have been frightening at all.
The picture was simply the view out a jetliner window. The view was of the Alps.
What would have been only a tourist snapshot at the beginning of March now symbolized the terrifying entrapment of a planeload of passengers who never would touch friendly earth alive again. The world turned upside down in a moment.
A Rapid Pace
Ross Douthat, by far The New York Times’ most conservative opinion writer, noted on March 30 that social liberals keep moving the goalposts ever further.
“One of the difficulties in this discussion, from a conservative perspective, is that the definition of ‘common sense’ and ‘compromise’ on these issues has shifted so rapidly in such a short time,” Douthat wrote.
“Positions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest atavism, the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic, and developments that social liberals would have described as right-wing scare stories in 2002 or so are now treated as just the most natural extensions of basic American principles. . . .
“[T]he pace involved is unusual, and its rapidity makes it very easy to imagine that scenarios that aren’t officially on the table right now will become plausible very, very soon,” he wrote.
The picturesque view out the airplane window quickly symbolizes a social death sentence. The passengers fear their routine flight through life goes headlong into solid rock.
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