The New Hampshire Union Leader has a long and storied history as the preeminent paper in the state, known for its conservative front-page editorials and making Ed Muskie cry.* I still have the "Talk is Cheap, Free Speech Isn't" T-shirt that I was awarded at a seminar the paper held for student journalists when I was in high school.
Now, the Union Leader is refusing to run a wedding announcement for a gay couple who will be married this weekend and is attracting ire from critics in the state, which recently legalized gay marriage. The paper says it would be hypocritical to run such an announcement after its long opposition to gay marriage, but the stance seems akin to refusing to cover a crime story because of your principled opposition to burglary. Sure, you can argue the distinction between the wedding announcements and hard news, but it's still not clear that pretending gay marriages aren't happening is a good way to make them go away.
Aside from revealing a sad lack of flintiness and proper belief in the "Live Free or Die" spirit that makes New Hampshire great, its stance also suggests an opportunity for the other papers in the state to make gains. If the Union Leader won't tell its readers about what's going on in the state, maybe Foster's Daily Democrat or the Concord Monitor will and earn some readers for their trouble. You hear all about Tea Partiers and their concerns about liberty, but watching this conservative institution try to shame Americans out there for pursuing happiness is just one more sign that the trends that lead the union aren't necessarily on the right. It'll be a wise institution that looks at the reactionaries of today and remembers that their anger is commensurate with the historically rapid disappearance of the status quo they hold dear.
-- Tim Fernholz
*Read how David Broder abetted a conservative dirty trick by his own complacency in 1972, proving that at least some things never change.
