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Times Watch for
November 21, 2003
Just Your Average Everyday Communists
Friday's story by Lizette Alvarez, "Marchers in London Denounce Bush Visit," attempts to mainstream the anti-war protestors who greeted Bush's state visit to London as just ordinary folk: "Despite gray skies, traffic jams and the demands of the work day, a broad cross-section of people turned up for the march, organized by the Stop the War Coalition, which also mobilized a mass protest in February. Grandmothers with canes, parents with children in strollers, high school students, women in business suits, as well as button-bedecked antiwar demonstrators gathered elbow to elbow in Trafalgar Square to voice their disapproval of Mr. Bush and his administration's foreign policies."
Alvarez ignores the huge turnout and organizing heft provided by the far-left Socialist Workers party, although the London Daily Telegraph notes the Communist or general lefty bent of many of the protestors: "There were hammers and sickles on display, pro-Palestinian, anti-globalisation, and anti-vivisection banners....The Socialist Workers Party, alive to the now-fashionable corporate emphasis on branding, had printed thousands of paper banners for the inexperienced marchers who had arrived unprepared."
Alvarez adds: " In fact, a few protesters said they were simply doing what did not seem to them permissible in America these days. 'It feels as though people in America are not allowed to express themselves in the same way," said Mary Nockles, 23, an administrator for an arts company. 'In America, it's a load of ticker tape and people paid to smile for the president. He shouldn't expect to be greeted here the way he usually is.'" (Paid to smile for the president? That vaunted British intellectualism is apparently in deep decline.)
For the rest of Alvarez's story on the London anti-war protests, click here.
• Lizette Alvarez | Anti-War Protests | Tony Blair | George Bush | George Galloway | London
Building a Shelter for Gay-Rights Advocacy
Bias coming out of the woodwork? Thursday's House & Home section features an article by Fred Bernstein, "Married or Not, It's a Full House," in which gay advocacy is dressed up as a story on interior design. Author Bernstein finds the gay-rights angle more compelling than the purported subject of the piece; the interior design of a large home in Oregon. "When Steven Lofton, Roger Choteau and Mr. Lofton's five foster children--who were born to H.I.V.-positive mothers--prepare Thanksgiving dinner, it will be in a kitchen in Portland, Ore., with cobalt blue walls and fire-engine-red Formica cabinets. Then they will join more than 20 guests in a dining room with an orange tabletop, yellow carpeting and a silver ceiling. 'Some of us are people of color," Mr. Lofton, 46, said, referring to his interracial family. 'And some of us are people who love color.' Mr. Lofton's sense of humor is one of the things that has sustained him through 16 years of raising children under laws that can be hostile to gay parents."
(With that kind of "humor," one wonders how Lofton sustains himself at all--but there's no accounting for taste, whether in humor or home furnishing.)
Bernstein writes: "This week, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, in ruling that same-sex couples should be allowed to marry, noted that children of such couples deserve the stability that marriage brings. The court wrote that children should not be penalized 'because the state disapproves of their parents' sexual orientation.'"
He then notes: "But not every state shares that view," detailing an adoption dispute involving Lofton and a child he tried to adopt when he lived in Florida. Near the end of the story, Bernstein notes approvingly: "All five children attend the Metropolitan Learning Center, a K-12 magnet school known for its open-minded attitude. 'It's the kind of school that has a float in the gay pride parade,' Mr. Lofton said.'" How adorable.
For the rest of the gay-rights story masquerading in the House & Home Section, click here.
• Adoption | Fred Bernstein | Gay Rights
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org