Timeswatch - Double Standards On Civil Disobedience?
Are there double standards on civil disobedience at the Times?
Last August, the Times stood in contempt of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who defied federal courts by refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument he'd installed in the state Supreme Court.
Flash forward to Thursday's story by Dean Murphy, headlined: "San Francisco Mayor Exults in Move on Gay Marriage." The teaser line: "A mayor's main goal: put a 'human face' on the gay marriage debate nationwide."
Both the Ten Commandments Judge and the Gay Marriage Mayor acted in defiance of law (California's Proposition 22, which became law four years ago, forbids same-sex marriage.) Yet while Murphy's story never even mentions Prop. 22 (he mentions it in passing in two earlier stories), back in August Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman made it quite clear Alabama Judge Roy Moore was in violation of federal law.
Murphy's story opens: "Mayor Gavin Newsom, the man behind San Francisco's week-old policy allowing same-sex marriages, sported a wide grin on Wednesday. Opponents of the policy had fared poorly in the courts, and the line of gay and lesbian couples waiting for marriage licenses at City Hall remained long and boisterous." Note that Newsom's state-defying action is benignly termed a "policy."
Murphy describes Newsom's epiphany, after hearing Bush's State of the Union address where the president spoke against gay marriage: "When Mr. Newsom returned to San Francisco, he said, he read the court decisions that authorized gay marriage in Massachusetts, as well as the United States Supreme Court ruling last year on sodomy. As he mulled those precedents and Mr. Bush's comments, he said, he became convinced that he had a moral obligation to open the doors to same-sex marriages."
Contrast that tone with the treatment of Roy Moore. While the Murphy story doesn't mention the illegality of Newsom's act, reporter Jeffrey Gettleman made clear in an August 20 story that Moore was in defiance of federal law and harked back to Alabama's segregationist past: "His obstinacy smacks of segregation-era defiance, of state rights versus 'the feds,' of George Wallace's notorious--and failed--stand in the school house door. But many people like that.”
The Times editorial page has shown a similar double standard. In an August 13 editorial, "Justice Roy Moore's Lawless Battle," the Times also tarred Moore with a George Wallace comparison: "Justice Moore's desire to ignore the Constitution's mandates on the separation of church and state has an uncomfortable resemblance to the arguments Gov. George Wallace made when he mounted his stand in the 'schoolhouse door' to block blacks from enrolling at the University of Alabama."
But Wednesday's editorial on the San Francisco marriage applauded the mayor's action in San Francisco: "The Massachusetts and San Francisco events are a welcome indication that the nation is having a long-overdue discussion about the right of gay people to marry, and that the states are beginning to serve as laboratories for reform in this important area."
The Times editorial even claims: "If gay marriage takes hold in Massachusetts or California--in both states, the issue is still up in the air--it will allow the residents of slower-moving states to observe the experiment in action." But it's not "up in the air" at all. California settled the issue in 2000 with the overwhelming passage of Proposition 22 (“Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”). |
