John McCandless Phillips, former reporter for The New York Times, writes in The Washington Post that he has counted 13 opinion columns in those papers over the last month aimed at evangelicals and traditional Catholics:
In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days.
The opening salvo of the heavy rhetorical artillery to which I object came in on March 24, when Maureen Dowd started her column in the Times with the declaration "Oh my God, we really are in a theocracy." . . .
Three days later Frank Rich . . . informed us that . . . "government, culture, science, medicine and the rule of law are all under threat from an emboldened religious minority out to remake America according to its dogma."
He went on to tell Times readers that GOP zealots in Congress and the White House have edged our country over into "a full-scale jihad." . . . If Rich were to have the misfortune to live for one week in a genuine jihad, and the unlikely fortune to survive it, he would temper his categorization . . .
As usual, Paul Krugman took first place amidst very tough competition:
In "What’s Going On" [March 29], [Paul] Krugman darkly implied that some committed religious believers in our nation bear a menacing resemblance to Islamic extremists, by which he did not mean a few crazed crackpots but a quite broad swath of red-staters.
Phillips is particularly perturbed by Krugman’s April 5 column in which “Krugman, conceding the wide majority of secular liberals over conservatives on the faculties of our major universities, had the supreme chutzpah to tell us why”:
The former, unfettered by presuppositions of faith, are free to commit genuine investigative work and to reach valid scholarly conclusions, while the latter are disabled in that critical respect by their unprovable prior assumptions.
So they are disqualified as a class from the university enterprise by their unfortunate susceptibility to the God hypothesis. . .
[T]he great East Coast universities (Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia and Yale among them) were, in cold fact, founded by men of faith and prayer for purposes that were informed and motivated by explicitly biblical principles. If Prof. Krugman were to read some of their faith-based pronouncements — many of them as much stronger than typical modern evangelical utterance as rum is from root beer — it would surely curl his hair. . .
The fact is that our founders did not give us a nation frightened by the apparition of the Deity lurking about in our most central places.
On Sept. 25, 1789, the text of what was later adopted as the First Amendment was passed by both houses of Congress, and subsequently sent to the states for ratification.
On that same day, the gentlemen in the House who had acted to give us that invaluable text took another action: They passed a resolution asking President George Washington to declare a national day of thanksgiving to no less a perceived eminence than almighty God.
That’s president, that’s national, that’s official and, alas, my doubting hearties, it’s God — all wrapped up in a federal action by those who knew what they meant by the non-establishment clause and saw their request as standing at not the slightest variance from it.
One wonders what the Founders would think of a federal judiciary concerned with the words “under God” in a pledge of allegiance, or a press unable to distinguish the religious beliefs of American citizens from a theocracy.