Saturday’s Post offered a simple case study of the media’s liberal bias on social issues. On the top of the front page of the Metro section is a story by reporter Sue Anne Pressley on the latest memorial event for “transgender” activists, headlined “Realizing, Fulfilling ‘Who They Are’: D.C. Slayings Help Galvanize Transgender Community’s Push for Acceptance.” Pressley writes didactically with the activist argot, aiming to indoctrinate people into that push for acceptance of “people who do not conform to traditional notions of gender identity, appearance and expression.” There is no radical (let alone liberal) labels to be found – and certainly not “out of the mainstream” – even as groups in the story are so shrink-wrapped tight that they use words like “Latina/o.” Also unlabeled is the Human Rights Campaign, whose activism is very Democratic-left. Pressley cites an HRC poll, as if “transgender acceptance” is reliably measured by hard-core activists. (Would the Post accept an American Family Association poll to paint an accurate picture of public opinion?) Pressley is so deep in the “transgender” tank that she repeatedly uses the desired, but inaccurate pronoun “she” to describe wishfully thinking biological males.
(Pardon me for sounding a bit like a “broken record,” to use a quaintly outdated term, but notice that 75 “transgender” activists make the front page of Metro in a group shot, while tens of thousands of pro-life marchers last January received a photo of one angry guy and his hostile mitten. )
By contrast, on the front page of the Saturday newspaper is a fairly straightforward summary by reporter Alan Cooperman of the divisions between “gay marriage foes.”
You can pick on the we’re-always-”foes” thing, and they do, of course, use the “conservative” label regularly. But unlike the Pressley press release, the Cooperman story also reaches out to gay Republican professor Dale Carpenter, who sneers about conservatives being “fixated on gay sex,” as if all these domestic partnerships would be built around celibate hand-holding. A little Googling quickly suggests that Mr. Carpenter would have been a fascinating presence in the “transgender” story. (See here or here.)
Does the Post mean to suggest that it’s only the religious right (and not the libertine left) which has internal debates? Or that focusing on one side’s internal debates adds to the flavor of impending (inevitable) political defeat?