Saturday, October 8, 2011

Via AmericaBlogGay: Dear Miami Herald, please stop calling religious right activists "Christian groups"



A Christian group has chastised U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, as “an arrogant, anti-family, homosexualist extremist” for becoming the first Republican in Congress to co-sponsor legislation to repeal the federal ban on gay marriage.


“We’re putting her and all other Republicans on notice that if they’re going to represent themselves as Republicans, they’ve got to respect the party platform,” said Anthony Verdugo, executive director of the Christian Family Coalition in Miami-Dade County.
The Catholic church is a Christian group. The Christian Family Coalition is a religious right activist organization. Hardly the same thing. That's like calling the Klan a Christian group too (I mean, they do believe in Christ, right, and hey, they have crosses!) And how about quoting gay religious groups that support Ros-Lehtinen the same way - simply call them "Christian groups" - I doubt the Herald would do that.

When you call a religious right activist organization simply "a Christian group," you mislead your readers into thinking that this is a mainstream Christian organization like the Catholic church, and it's not. It's a fundamentalist Christian advocacy organization with a history of anti-gay activism Don't "in" the religious right in an attempt to be "fair," all the while giving your readers an unfair sense of what the story is really about.

This isn't about Christians being upset with Ros-Lehtinen, it's about the far-right of the Republican party being upset with her, and that's a different animal all together.

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