Media Embrace Mob Rule in Texas

Mollie Hemingway of Patheos makes a point also made by Stephen Hayes on Fox News Special Report on Wednesday about Wendy Davis’s filibuster of a new abortion law in Texas: that the journalists reporting and tweeting breathlessly about her stand also failed to report or acknowledge the grisly Gosnell murder case that gave rise to the legislation. Worse, however, is the fact that the media cheered the mob that helped her.

Gail Collins of the New York Times is just one example. In a column today, she celebrates the “protestors” who disrupted the Texas legislature from the gallery, preventing the elected representatives of the people from concluding their session. No doubt Collins would be screaming in anger and calling for the sergeant-at-arms if a group of pro-life protestors had interrupted a debate about abortion with Christian prayer.

The media’s enthusiasm for the disruption in Texas echoes their enthusiasm for the crowds that surged around and in the Wisconsin state capitol during debate over Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms, along with the fourteen Democrats who fled the state to deny the legislature a quorum. The supposed intellectual elites who guide our national conversation have no use for democracy if it doesn’t go their way.

And one more point is worth observing: the left-wing mobs that stormed Madison, Austin, and Zuccottii Park have done more to damage democracy, liberty and property than any Tea Party protest has ever conceived of doing. Yet the mainstream media portrayed them for years as a violent, racist lynch mob waiting for a chance to get a clean shot at the president. That false perception is reality for many observers.

Even the Supreme Court has bought into the double standard. In his ruling striking down the Defense of Marriage Act, Justice Anthony Kennedy assailed the bigotry that supposedly motivated it. Yet it was gay marriage supporters, not opponents, who erupted after Prop 8 was passed in 2008, venting at Mormons and others. Apparently some mob rule enjoys judicial protection. Maybe it’s that “living” Constitution.