The “Religious Liberty” Scare Quotes

You see the scare quotes around “religious liberty” in recent media reports as if the very idea is some kind of subterfuge.
Media scare quotes are not just obfuscation, they’re an accusation that something very different, probably malevolent, is actually occurring.

NBC recently did a report on a Mississippi bill by calling it an “anti-gay uproar” that was a “thinly-veiled license to discriminate against gays and lesbians.”

They couldn’t seem to find anyone who actually supported the bill to discuss it on camera even though a majority of people in the state support it.

CBS’ Mark Strassmann called the bill the “‘so-called’ religious freedom law” and added that Mississippi now offered gays and lesbians “the least discrimination protection in America.”

Hey, remember when the media used to say “the procedure which some call partial birth abortion” as if to say it’s not really a baby being partially removed from the womb and killed, it just sounds exactly like that. Funny how they never could exactly explain how it wasn’t that though, could they?

Look, protecting business owners who have a religious objection to taking part in a same-sex marriage is not hateful and it’s not segregation which some in the media are calling it. I don’t even really understand how that word gets involved at all.

Or how about the Little Sisters of the Poor who advocate for “religious freedom.” Are they really just a hate group in disguise. Anti-woman? That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?

Or what about protecting women and children from men barging into their bathrooms because man, they feel like a woman that day. Is that hate?

David Harsanyi writes at The Federalist:

Progressives regularly argue that the state should be empowered to take the role of church, instructing believers when they should set aside their faith. This is why editors and writers adorn the words religious freedom with quotation marks. “Religious liberty” becomes a scam, a phony ideal used by fake Christians to mask their true contempt for gays. This is the tone that’s embedded in most of the coverage.

If media covered religious liberty and took millions of Christians at their word rather than trying to bore into their souls to derive intent, the public would see a far more complicated issue. Then finger-wagging pundits would have to admit that the Left doesn’t care for that particular freedom any more or, even worse, they’d have to craft arguments that went beyond accusing everyone of being motivated by bigotry.

Here’s the deal Christians. The media hates you. Understand that. Accept that. And then everything becomes clearer. They think what you believe, who you are, and your vision of the country is backwards and evil (if they believe in evil).

I think many in the media see themselves as re-creating the 60’s where a minority stood up bravely against a coercive government. Except that they’re actually in league with the coercive government intent on stomping on a minority. But other than that, it’s exactly right.