Religious Right

On Tuesday's New Day, CNN's Chris Cuomo bizarrely zeroed in on presidential contender Ben Carson's religious beliefs as a possible factor that could hurt his chances among the Republican base: "Is it fair criticism to look at Dr. Carson's faith being Seventh Day Adventist, in terms of how it may oppose evangelicals? There is a belief within the strictest tenets of Seventh Day Adventist belief…

With this month’s passage in California of the “End of Life Option Act,” CBS’s latest episode of The Good Wife paints a perfect picture of liberal support for physician-assisted suicide. Drawing a line in the sand, the show’s writers point to the “Catholic and conservative lobbies” as the foes of freedom – the freedom of doctors to kill their patients.

Continuing to show viewers that the routine mocking of conservatives wouldn’t end with Jon Stewart’s departure, new Daily Show host Trevor Noah savaged the pro-life movement on Monday night and lamented that they aren’t devout advocates for gun control which Noah argued is “an issue where the facts” would be “actually on their side.”

As part of a piece on Friday’s CBS This Morning about the opening of the first freestanding Chick-fil-a in New York City, correspondent Vladimir Duthiers couldn’t help but harp on the company’s conservative Christian values and how they had to supposedly draw customers back “in 2012 when those values ran afoul of public sentiment” after “CEO Dan Cathy affirmed his support for tradition marriage.”

ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel took time out of his opening monologue on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live to grumble over the news that Pope Francis secretly met with Kentucky clerk Kim Davis last week during his visit to the U.S. and quip that it would have been better if he met with Kim Kardashian or murderous North Korea dictator Kim Jong-un instead.  

Esquire’s Charles Pierce is a graduate of a Jesuit university (Marquette). It’s among the many reasons he’s been a big fan of Pope Francis, the first-ever Jesuit pontiff, and it’s probably one factor in his vehement disappointment that Francis met with, and apparently encouraged, gay-marriage objector Kim Davis last week in Washington. Pierce referred to the pope’s behavior regarding the “…

Variations on the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” are common on both the right and the left (a Google search for “Clinton Derangement Syndrome” yielded roughly 180,000 results). Therefore, it wasn’t surprising to see Indiana University law prof Steve Sanders modify Charles Krauthammer’s famous coinage in order to trash religious conservatives. “The Christian right is deep in the grip of gay…

On Sunday, NBC Nightly News found it pertinent to run a puff piece on a liberal Tennessee church that fill-in weekend anchor Carl Quintanilla hyped as a place “where the views of all are welcome” and gay people are welcomed with the full benefits of membership (including baptisms and marriages).  

Regarding the mainstream media’s superficial coverage of religion, is the sticking point excessive evenhandedness or simple ignorance? Two lefty bloggers differed Friday on that issue. First, Paul Waldman wrote on The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog that reporters don’t like asking the presidential candidates “about the specifics of their faith and how it might influence their day-to-day…

Comedy Central's Larry Wilmore vomited up the oft-used leftist insults of social conservatives on Tuesday's Nightly Show in a rant about Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. Wilmore hinted that her supporters were akin to the Ku Klux Klan, and mocked her Christian prayer gesture as a Nazi salute. The "comedian" later likened Davis to notorious segregationist George Wallace, and hyped that "going to jail for…

The Week’s Paul Waldman agrees with conservatives that the undercover Planned Parenthood videos raise a profound moral issue, but disagrees sharply with them over what that issue is. In a Friday post, Waldman asserted that “this controversy simply has nothing to do with fetal tissue” and claimed that it’s really about the right’s disgust with women’s sexual “autonomy.” “Republicans have always…

A 7,000-word New York Times Magazine cover story by Eliza Griswold, "The Shadow of Death," is an all-too-rare look from a major media outlet at the decimation of Christianity in the place of its birth, the Middle East, at the hands of radical Islamist groups like ISIS. From the cover text: "Christians in the Middle East are being forced out of their homes, enslaved and killed. Why is no one…

As of Wednesday morning, NPR's morning and evening newscasts have yet to cover the second undercover video of a Planned Parenthood executive revealing how the organization varies its abortion procedures in order to preserve the organs of unborn babies for medical research. Instead, Tuesday's All Things Considered spotlighted a March 2014 incident where the adult son of a pro-life activist…

A movie dramatization of the Stanford prison experiment opened this weekend, but if you believe Andrew O’Hehir, that’s not the first time the 1971 psychological study has been restaged in some manner. O’Hehir asserted in a Saturday piece that over the past few decades, “the Republican Party has been the subject, willing or otherwise, of a version” of the Stanford experiment, with the result that…