The faith of Jason Collins, who recently came out as the first gay athlete in a major American sport, doesn’t fit the model of culture war conflicts the media expects and the religious right demands of its spokespeople.
The notion that the news media is a secularist cabal ignoring stories that challenge its shibboleths is wrongheaded. The media is not sentient and its decisions are not logical. It reacts more than acts, often driven by random factors (What did my husband say over breakfast? Who’s trending on Twitter? When was the last time I read a story about ____?). Equally mistaken is the premise that if there were more believers in the nation’s newsrooms things would be different.
With the power vested in us by ourselves, we have chosen ten candidates in the hopes that one of them will win popular acclaim and restore glory to a throne too long left empty.
There are many stories on which a Mormon is raised: narratives of the elect, America and the Constitution, the latter days, and free agency—all of which play a role in Mitt Romney’s “severe” conservatism.
Much of the hullabaloo surrounding Rick Santorum’s comment that President Obama is a “snob” for pushing college is missing the bigger picture: that Santorum is a cosmic conspiracy theorist, and higher education sits at the heart of the imagined conspiracy.
