Deborah Gyapong: Yay! Charles Lewis at the National Post

Yay! Charles Lewis at the National Post

Who has an excellent column over at The Holy Post blog on why fair religion coverage is important.

As an aside, I'd like to add that fair religion coverage deserves to have people doing the writing who are as well-informed about faith matters as sports journalists are about sports or business journalists are about finance and economics. But usually we do not even have people covering the beat who are willing to admit they know little about the subject. What we often have is something equivalent to sending me out to cover the World Cup in South Africa, but with my having smug bias against soccer and a smug superiority and invincible ignorance to boot.

Anyway, go on over and read his whole piece, but here's a salient segment, with my bolds:

The number of issues confronting society in which the rights of the religious are coming into conflict with the rights of the secular are becoming more numerous. Just witness the recent attack on Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec City for stating Catholic opposition to abortion, even in the case of rape. Yet, when he and Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa called for a way to reduce abortion — not to make it illegal — by finding common ground on all sides, the story was completely ignored because it did not fit the stereotype of what Catholic leaders are supposed to say.

In the past few years we have seen the licensing body for doctors in Ontario push, but fail, to remove religious conscience provisions for doctors who refuse to refer patients for abortion. And recently the courts said that Christian Horizons, an evangelical group that helps the most desperate of Ontario’s citizens lead lives of dignity and respect, could not fire a woman for being gay, even though she signed a moral code voluntarily.

These issues are as important as anything else we hear out of Parliament Hill or City Hall because they hit people where they live.

Religious people deserve a voice, and not just from the religious media. It is worth reminding those who would ignore religious citizens that is most often the churches, in the name of Christ, who feed and house the homeless, who care for society’s discards and care deeply about their fellow citizens. If they are ignored in the mainstream media, our democracy will suffer for it.