As we’re seeing with the politics surrounding Rev. Louie Giglio, the media is using the issue of homosexuality as a way to to redefine morality in order to score points against the Right. In the case of Giglio, we had a Christian pastor criticized and railroaded out of performing the benediction at Obama’s Inaugural over a sermon he delivered in the 1990s covering biblical views on homosexuality.
Either the media participated in this witch hunt or was complicit in its silence, as Christianity itself was branded as bigoted and one of its proponents vanquished.
Today, some are actually criticizing media reporter Howard Kurtz for protesting a Daily Beast story that would have outed Anderson Cooper before Cooper himself came out to Andrew Sullivan last year:
CNN media critic Howard Kurtz is being accused of pressuring an editor at the Daily Beast, where he is a columnist, to kill a story that would have outed CNN’s Anderson Cooper as gay — an accusation Kurtz strongly dismisses. …
In an interview with Capital New York about Jodie Foster’s acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, BuzzFeed reporter Kate Aurthur, a former Daily Beast editor, said that in 2011 Kurtz had “interfered with a story” about Cooper in order to protect him from being outed.
“[This] was less than two years ago. I was an editor at The Daily Beast then, and assigned Tricia Romano to write a story about [gay news anchors]. It was tricky, because Anderson Cooper wasn’t out yet, and talking about [Fox News host] Shepard Smith means having to deal with Fox News, which can be hard,” Aurthur told Capital. ..
“These suggestions are offensive and absurd. My position, publicly and privately, has always been the same: I don’t out people and responsible news organizations shouldn’t out people. I didn’t control what anyone at the Daily Beast had to say on the subject,” Kurtz wrote.
Just as the media is now participating in or standing silent as Christianity is declared bigoted, and those who preach it are silenced and marginalized, it is also now some kind of virtue to invade the privacy of another and publicly out them as gay, against their will.
Apparently, respecting the civil rights of homosexuals does not apply to privacy when the pushing of a political agenda is at stake.
Listen, I’m no Kurtz fan, and watching him get a taste of the media’s merciless identity politics game, which he never seems to object to when it is destroying Republicans, is kind of fun. But that he is and was righteous on this one shouldn’t even be up for debate. And yet it is.
It has been four years of watching the media turn the whole world upside down. Christianity is de facto bigotry; self-made economic success is de facto evil; the guy exploding the deficit by more than all past presidents is the reasonable one; a stagnant, jobless recovery is a good thing; and arguing against outing someone is worthy of criticism, not the other way around.
And it’s only going to get worse.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC