FIC Blog

On September 16th a Hartford jury acquitted a blogger of threatening and inciting violence against three state officials because, they told the media, the prosecution did not meet its burden of proof.

This blog post is not about that. It is about the laughingly incomplete description of S.B. 1098, the 2009 Bishop Removal Bill, given by the media throughout the trial. A classic example can be found in David Owens’ Sept. 16th Hartford Courant story:

[The blogger’s] remarks were a reaction to a bill that would have given some control over the Roman Catholic Church to lay members.

Really? That’s it? A reader could be forgiven for wondering why the bill provoked “an outcry from Catholics across the state,” as the next sentence tells us, if all it did was “give” those same Catholics “some control.” Why all the fuss?

In fact, the bill was an attempt by our civil government to reach into the state’s largest religious denomination and, in flagrant violation of the First Amendment and of that denomination’s theological beliefs, to strip Connecticut’s Catholic bishops and priests of authority over their own parishes. It was widely believed–one Senator said it publicly–that the true motivation behind the bill was revenge against the Catholic Church for its opposition to same-sex “marriage.” 4,500 outraged citizens, on just a few days notice, showed up at the state Capitol on a Wednesday to protest the bill. The state’s subsequent investigation of the Bridgeport Diocese for organizing that protest was so lacking in merit that then-Attorney General Richard Blumenthal refused to defend it against a lawsuit from the Diocese, thus effectively ending the investigation.

S.B. 1098 was the biggest issue to hit the state Capitol in years. Few other occasions in recent memory provoked 4,500 people to rally there on a weekday. As a bare minimum service to their readers and as a duty to history, the media should not whitewash it.