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Times Watch for
March 2, 2004
Bigots and Bashers, Oh My!
The Times throws around B-words in two Monday stories on Bush's proposed gay marriage amendment. Elisabeth Bumiller's "On Gay Marriage, Bush May Have Said All He's Going To" portrays the president as acting out of "enormous pressure from his evangelical Christian supporters." She follows up: "His more moderate supporters, on the other hand, worried that he might look like a gay basher. Mr. Bush's friends say that is hardly the case and that the president is quite comfortable with gays."
She closes with advice from a Bush "adviser": "While Mr. Bush's closest advisers say that he genuinely feels that marriage is between a man and a woman only--the same position that Senators John Kerry and John Edwards take--some of his advisers also say the president would have been better off keeping his opinions to himself. Last summer, Charles Francis, a Bush family friend and a co-chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, an influential gay-straight political alliance, bemoaned what might happen if gay marriage were to become an issue in the 2004 campaign. 'Marriage panic is not good for the political process or the country,' Mr. Francis said then. By November, when the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made its ruling allowing gay marriage in the state, the issue was well on its way. 'We're hopeful that the campaign will steer clear of this amendment,' Mr. Francis said in an interview at the time. 'It's an issue of tone. It's the issue of writing discrimination into the founding document. Also it's so distracting from the real priorities of the campaign, which are his leadership, the war in Iraq and the economy.' Last week, Mr. Francis did not return phone calls about Mr. Bush's announcement in the Roosevelt Room."
Calling Charles Francis a Bush "adviser"--and then positing his failure to return a phone call as some significant event--is an exaggeration that serves only to buttress the pro-gay-marriage side.
On the front page, religion reporter Lynette Clemetson focuses on efforts by activists on both sides to rally black churches to their cause. Clemetson's stilted formulation puts the onus on gay-marriage opponents to prove themselves unhateful: "Advocates of gay marriage are appealing to those on the left end of that spectrum to show that the issue is really about civil rights. Those opposed are courting more conservative blacks as evidence that they are not bigots for suggesting the issue has nothing to do with civil rights."
For the rest of Bumiller's article on Bush and gay marriage, click here.
For the rest of Clemetson's article on black churches and gay marriage, click here.
• Amendment | Elisabeth Bumiller | George W. Bush | Gay Marriage | Religion
Editorial writer Adam Cohen spreads a little paranoia in Sunday's story on electronic voting machines, hinting that just maybe there's some doubt about two Republican Senate wins in 2002. His column, "The Results Are in and the Winner Is…or Maybe Not," opens: "Rob Behler isn't saying Max Cleland's Senate seat was stolen by rigged electronic voting machines, but he insists it could have been. Mr. Behler, who helped prepare Georgia's machines for the 2002 election, says secret computer codes were installed late in the process. Votes 'could have been manipulated,' he says, and the election thrown to the Republican, Saxby
Chambliss."
Cohen has no evidence to support the claim--which he himself terms a conspiracy theory--but that doesn't stop him from trying to tease out allegedly suspicious circumstances from the wins of two Republican senators: "Among the growing ranks of electronic-voting skeptics, Mr. Cleland's loss in 2002 and Mr. Hagel's wins in 1996 and 2002 have taken on mythic status. There is no evidence the wrong man is in the Senate today. The problem is, there is no way to prove the right man was elected, either. Mr. Cleland's loss was, some say, a surprise. He was said to be leading in the polls before Election Day, but ended up losing decisively. Many political observers attribute his loss to President Bush's strong support for Mr. Chambliss, and attack ads picturing Senator Cleland with Osama bin Laden. But others are suspicious of the new voting machines in Georgia."
(As Times Watch noted last week, there's substantial doubt as to whether or not the campaign ad in question actually pictured Cleland alongside bin Laden.)
Of course, election gripes go both ways. Two other Senate races in 2002 lost by Republicans had more than their share of controversy, with allegations of vote fraud in South Dakota and a controversial changing of election rules in New Jersey. Will Cohen dredge up those old gripes as well? Don't count on it.
For the rest of Cohen's column, click here.
• Sen. Max Cleland | Adam Cohen | Editorial | Senate | Voting Machines
Marriage Defenders and the Return of George Wallace
Frank Rich hooks gay marriage to the civil rights movement in his Sunday column "The Joy of Gay Marriage" and compares defenders of traditional marriage to Southern segregationists. Speaking of Bush and Kerry's reluctance to face the issue, he writes: "And so the vacuum will be enthusiastically filled by Defenders of Marriage eager to foment the bloodiest culture war possible. They are gladly donning the roles played by Lester Maddox and George Wallace in the civil rights era, even at the price of turning women like Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin into the new century's incarnation of Rosa Parks….The rhetoric of die-hard segregationists is back as well, complete with its warnings of how untraditional marriages can beget polygamy and bestiality."
Notwithstanding the offensive comparison between defenders of traditional marriage and segregationists, as the MRC's Tim Graham notes, it wasn't Rich's "Defenders of Marriage" that started this skirmish in the culture war, but gay activists themselves.
For more of Rich's ranting, click here.
• Amendment | George W. Bush | Gay Marriage | Frank Rich
Pointing Out Liberal Bias = "Lobbing a Grenade"
David Carr talks to former Ladies' Home Journal editor Myrna Blyth about her new book, "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America," which argues that women's magazines promote liberal fear-mongering alongside the celebrity profiles.
The article's headline, "Lobbing a Grenade at Women's Magazines," smacks of overkill, which is matched by this Carr metaphor: "But after her decision to throw a grenade over her shoulder upon leaving an industry she was very much a part of for more than three decades, many in her former cohort see her as traitorous and self-interested."
Carr later pens this oddity: "She may make a few new friends among conservatives who find something naughtily transgressive in her suggestion that most leading women's magazines have insinuated progressive politics into their messages."
Times Watch doesn't quite understand that sentence, but plans to drop the term "naughtily transgressive" into conversation more often.
For the rest of Carr's take on Blyth, click here.
• Myrna Blyth | Books | David Carr | Liberal Bias
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org