How The Media Attack Religious Liberty

Most of the media won’t acknowledge that Americans who refuse to participate in a gay wedding could have any sincerely held beliefs or good faith arguments. For the media, there is hate. And there is light.

And one way the news media signal their disdain of religious liberty is by insinuating that the entire debate is bogus. Editors do this by putting quotation marks around the term “religious freedom,” as if this notion, when practiced by Christians, is somehow ambiguous or manipulative or deceptive.

Now, if those quotation marks exist because the topic itself is up for debate, then why isn’t there a similar journalistic standard for the usage of “inequality,” “environmentalist,” “civil rights,” “investments,” “loopholes” or any of the hundreds of other similarly contentious or loaded words in our political discourse?

Another, more overt way of misleading the public about religious freedom is framing the debate as a struggle between open-minded, civil-rights-seeking gays and a bunch of bigots frightened of progress — essentially the tone of every piece covering Mississippi’s new religious liberty law.

Here’s a tweet about the Mississippi Religious Freedom Restoration Act from the allegedly unbiased The Hill.

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