In this piece, John McCandlish Phillips points out the bizarre and unfounded nature of MSM and the left's hysteria about evangelical Christians' influence on politics:
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. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market.
This hysteria is something different from disagreement, even vigorous disagreement. It's an attitude that denies the legitimacy of participation in our public life by the group that began this polity some 400 years ago, and has regularly influenced our culture.
And much of it is born out of sheer ignorance. There are people to whom the Bible is as obscure and unknown as the Zend-Avesta or the Egyptian Book of the Dead even though, religion aside, it's one of the charter documents, perhaps the charter document of our civilization.
I'm not prepared to drum any civil, law-abiding group out of our public life, or reflexively regard their participation as a threat to freedom. That doesn't mean I have to support all their causes, and indeed, they are a diverse group in many ways, culturally, theologically and poltiically, so they don't even support all one another's causes.
There are a lot of people out there to whom one must say, "Take a Valium!"
HT: Hugh Hewitt.
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