Religious Correctness, Part I
"Losing Their Religion" by Digby at Hullabaloo brings up an earlier post at AMERICAblog about religious discrimination (and heterosexist discrimination, among others) in blastocyst adoption. (That's the pre-embryonic stage of mammalian development, for those who haven't been keeping up with the terminology of the stem cell debate.)
Digby discusses how the NYT editors:
"'re-framed' the issue of religious discrimination and gay rights. They are simply being 'sensitive' and 'conveying how disturbing the issue us in many corners of American social, cultural and religious life' when they uncritically report on a White House endorsed publicly funded group that enables Christian bigots to discriminate even though it's clearly against the law."
He then notes that the bogeyman of 1990s liberalism, political correctness, has now become "the new province of the right and they have finally hammered the press into thinking that discrimination and bigotry are really just normal expressions of religious belief and must be treated with kid gloves." This is nothing if not religious correctness, emblematic of that all-too-useful term from Isaac Kramnick & R. Laurence Moore's excellent (and far too brief) book The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness.
Correctness – whether political or religious – be damned, bigots should be called bigots (and terrorists terrorists) regardless of which religious text they clutch in their hands.