Via Amanda Hess: Jonetta Rose Barras, a columnist for the conservative Washington Examiner, writes at her website that D.C.'s anti-equality movement believes they received a "raw deal" because:
Several of the individuals who reported on the legislation are themselves gay. None revealed their status in the gay community, which surely created in TBR[The Barras Report]'s mind a bias. TBR doesn't want to out anyone. They know who they are.
Apparently, Barras has a list of several known communists gays who work in the State Department Washington media. This is how Barras proves how "non-discriminatory" she is: by issuing a veiled threat of outing LGBT reporters she feels advance a cause she's against.
Barras further argues that being LGBT and reporting on LGBT issues constitutes a "conflict of interest" that reporters should "publicly announce," an assertion that she clearly hasn't thought through. Put aside the idea that an individual's sexual preferences are their own business. When her assertion is taken to its logical conclusion, black reporters should disclose their race when writing about black issues, Jewish reporters about issues involving Jews, and so on and so forth. Barras is essentially arguing that the immutable circumstances of an individual's birth are, by definition, conflicts of interest -- except she only wants to apply that standard to the LGBT community. This is, presumably, the kind of argument Barras considers "non-discriminatory."
Barras further complains that Bishop Harry Jackson, head of Stand4MarriageDC, was referred to as an "outsider" in the press and that marriage equality opponents were "cast as backward, homophobic, discriminatory crew."
Well, let's consider Jackson. He's a preacher who lives in Maryland and registers to vote in D.C. in order to interfere with that city's laws; he's underwritten by the National Organization for Marriage, an outside white conservative organization; he's represented by the high-powered conservative public relations firm Shirley and Bannister Public Affairs; his lawyers come from the Alliance Defense Fund, an organization founded by James Dobson; he's pals with the Family Research Center's Tony Perkins; and he spent summer of 2008 penning columns supporting John McCain. Yeah, all that makes you an "outsider" in mostly Democratic Washington D.C., when you move beyond the Hill.
But moving past that, the city's biggest paper, the Washington Post, went out of its way to paint the anti-equality movement, and Jackson in particular, in a positive light ("young Harry was being bloodied and knocked to the ground by sorrow itself"). It was considerably more measured when describing proponents of marriage equality. Jackson is also an occasional columnist at the Washington Times, a paper that only recently stopped referring to the LGBT community as "homosexuals." And Jackson certainly got his due in the Examiner. So what Washington papers is Barras talking about? The City Paper? The Washington Blade (now DC Agenda), otherwise known as the city's oldest LGBT newspaper? That's certainly "undercover" for you right there. Barras' assertion is wrong on its face.
There is, of course, a very sincere, locally based opposition distinct from Jackson that is led by a segment of the city's religious leadership, and I focused much of my initial reporting on them. But as for being "homophobic" or "discriminatory," I'd like to hear how a larger movement devoted to denying LGBT people civil rights -- and then complaining of all the "undercover gays" undermining that movement when it falters -- could possibly be motivated by anything else. It's not that the press called the anti-equality movement "homophobic" or "discriminatory" -- it's that the movement is homophobic and discriminatory. Barras can't figure out any way to counter that charge other than to bring her hand to her chest and gasp in mock horror, as though she might cower critics into silence by taking offense at the obvious.
-- A. Serwer
