SUSAN CAMPBELL’S SUNDAY COLUMN AND THE PROBLEM WITH THE COURANT
October 11th, 2006 by Peter
[Anne Stanback] has testified before umpteen legislative committees and debated the most rabid opponents of marriage equality with equal aplomb…
“Anne has gone down a particularly difficult path and had to encounter much resistance,” says [Hall of Fame executive director Katherine B.] Wiltshire. “I think she is remarkable and deserves much credit for her courageous battle against some pretty vicious opposition.”
By “rabid” and “vicious” they mean that we testified against their cause—marshalling arguments based in reason and social science—and held rallies, press conferences and petition drives to protect the one man-one woman definition of marriage. In other words, we exercised our rights as Americans to assemble and engage in free speech.
Meanwhile, pro same-sex “marriage” activists in the dead of night vandalized and stole pro-family banners hanging on churches—and made a death threat against the executive director of the Connecticut Catholic Conference.
You won’t see Susan Campbell writing about these events. In fact, she once actually cited a pro same-sex “marriage” activist—who had publicly compared the attacks on our churches to “justice actions”—to the effect that our mere opposition to same-sex “marriage” makes us responsible for violence.
Yes, I know there is a different—some might say lower—standard for “lifestyle columnists” like Campbell. But almost all the Courant’s columnists write like this. We often hear from FIC members who say they have dropped the Courant not only because they feel attacked by writers like Campbell but because they do not feel their stories are being told in its pages.
Campbell’s Sunday column is a reminder that what I wrote about the Courant on this blog on Oct. 5, 2005 is as valid today as it was a year ago:
The problem at the Courant is not that they have staff with unacknowledged liberal worldviews. The problem is that those folks seem to make up the entire staff. There is no ideological diversity at the Courant. All the columnists are social liberals (yes, even Larry Cohen). Stan Simpson might not be, but religion, abortion, same-sex “marriage” and related issues aren’t really his beat.
Is there any columnist at the Courant who worships at a conservative evangelical church? Who homeschools her children? Who is opposed to the legalization of abortion and same-sex “marriage?” Who is opposed to contraception and practices natural family planning? Who belongs to a conservative Catholic lay group like Opus Dei or Regnum Christi? Who believes sex outside of marriage is sinful and something society ought to discourage?
The above paragraph describes an awful lot of people in Connecticut—more than you think. We know, because we work with them all the time. They form the backbone of the movement to protect marriage. And their voice is not represented in the pages of the Hartford Courant.
If the Courant could do one thing—just one thing!—to address its bias problem, I recommend this: hire a social conservative columnist, one who can answer “yes” to the questions I listed above. Break the liberal monopoly that has a stranglehold over your staff of regular columnists. I don’t mean someone who will appear occasionally on the op-ed page. I mean someone who will appear in the paper as often as Helen Ubinas or Susan Campbell.
There are entire worlds-within-worlds of the Connecticut experience that readers of the Courant are not being exposed to. A social conservative columnist plugged into those worlds would do the paper—and the state—an immense amount of good.
I know from conversations with several Courant personnel that the bias is not intentional, but it exists nonetheless. The paper could go a long way toward ending it by that one simple step of hiring someone who can shine a light on—and speak for—those not being heard in its pages.
