Greetings from the middle seat of row 32 on a 737 to Reagan International Airport, the airport that everyone remembers as much better than it actually was. Very little of value can happen on Combat! blog from this position, since even the uploading of photographs doesn’t work here. We’ll back tomorrow, but in the meantime check out this fair and balanced article from Fox News, about a woman who was expelled from her graduate program in counseling for her refusal to counsel homosexuals. Two things are striking:
1) The sentence “Monday’s ruling, according to Julea Ward’s attorneys, could result in Christian students across the country being expelled from public university [sic] for similar views,” is a good example of why you don’t source a trial story using only one party’s lawyers. Julea Ward was not expelled for believing that homosexuality is a sin, but for refusing to serve gay clients in contravention of the American Counseling Association’s code of ethics, which her graduate program has adopted. But basically they kicked her out for being a Christian.
2) Who is this story for? Presumably, even Fox does not believe that Ward’s case presages mass expulsion of Christian students from public universities. A certain segment of the Fox readership probably does, but does News Corp want those people to be even further misinformed? Maybe. Probably, though, the old canard that Fox is for some reason actively deceiving its own audience into additional stupidity is once again a little hysterical. I propose another theory: any sufficiently large news outlet, be it the New York Times or Fox, will eventually experience such demand for thematically congruent content that it moves into the realm of speculative fiction. This story about how public universities are on the verge of making it illegal to think homosexuality is wrong is the equivalent of a Times piece about how everybody loves hats.
We’ll be back with more unsubstantiated theories tomorrow.
