The Nation

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Coverage of book war at tiny library in Dayton, Washington, settled for voices on one side

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Coverage of book war at tiny library in Dayton, Washington, settled for voices on one side

Dayton is a cute little town in Washington state’s southeastern corner that hovers near the region’s fabled wine industry.

I stayed there one New Year’s Eve while skiing at the nearby Bluewood resort and let me tell you, the social scene in downtown Dayton was deader than a doornail. Maybe everyone had gone to nearby Walla Walla to party.

Which is why I was curious when the Seattle Times recently ran a piece about the townspeople possibly voting its tiny library out of existence.

DAYTON, COLUMBIA COUNTY — Book battles are raging across the nation, but none have carried the kind of stakes as the one here in Dayton, a one-stoplight farming community in the southeastern corner of Washington.

For the county’s only library, the battle has turned, quite literally, existential: Voters will decide in November whether to shut it down.

The library, which has occupied the same modest brick building a block off Main Street for 86 years, is at risk not because of a lack of funding or a lack of demand for its services. Instead, it could shutter because of a yearlong dispute over the placement of, at first, one book, then a dozen and now well over 100, all dealing with gender, sexuality or race.

More than 100 books?

I’m curious what the annual book-buying budget is for this place. This area is deep red-state Washington, not freewheeling Seattle, so where is the audience that is demanding that many books of this kind on the local shelves?

It would be the first library in the country to close because of a dispute over what books are on the shelves, according to the American Library Association.

“That is the end of the library as we know it,” said Jay Ball, who owns a local auto shop and chairs the library’s board of directors. “It’s insane, it’s just insane.”


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Religious Freedom Restoration Act: AP story shows why this is a law liberals could love

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Many of us may have heard of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which has been in effect since 1993 during the administration of President Bill Clinton. This was an era in which a broad coalition of liberals and conservatives often worked together on religious liberty issues.

Of course, RFRA has been vilified by liberals as a sop to conservatives, chiefly because it was used successfully in the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court “Hobby Lobby” case that allowed the crafts store chain to not provide birth control coverage for its employees. RFRA is frequently connected to religious liberty debates linked to LGBTQ issues, as well.

But now, many critics of RFRA are praising it after it was employed in the defense of Scott Warren, a Unitarian who was charged with harboring illegal aliens near a border crossing in the Arizona desert in January 2018. Our own Bobby Ross wrote about this case here and here.

A new Associated Press analysis describes why RFRA suddenly became important again:

Religious liberty is often a high priority for conservatives, but last week’s acquittal of an Arizona man prosecuted for aiding migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border is spotlighting the ability of religious freedom law to shield people of faith regardless of political ideology.

The case of Scott Warren, a college instructor and volunteer with a humanitarian group that helps migrants, gained nationwide notice as he challenged what he called the government’s “attempt to criminalize basic human kindness.”

Much of that attention focused on Warren’s acquittal on felony charges of harboring. But he was also acquitted Wednesday of a separate misdemeanor charge after his lawyers argued that his religious beliefs motivated him to leave water for migrants crossing through a desert wilderness area.

This was written by Elana Schor, the AP reporter for religion and politics who is part of AP’s new global religion reporting team, announced Sept. 5 that’s being paid for by a grant from the Lilly Endowment. (I broke the story about the grant here back in April 2018).

Warren’s acquittal this past week was a huge victory for the Religious Left.


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Reporters and the Supreme Court cake bake-off: Was religious freedom the guiding issue?

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Although the opening arguments for Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (transcript .pdf here) included a plea for religious freedom, that point got lost in articles about Tuesday’s historic hearing in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

It’s true that the plaintiff’s attorney, Kristen Waggoner, barely got out one paragraph of her intro before justices began interrupting her with questions about cakes and compelled speech.

It’s also true that covering a Supreme Court hearing (I’ve done it two or three times) is like covering a knife fight between 10 participants (nine justices and the hapless attorney before them). It takes discipline for media scribes to remember the main thing is the main thing; in this case, whether a believer can be forced by the state to give a message that contradicts his or her religious convictions.

GLAAD, the gay-rights organization that monitors coverage of homosexuals by the media, saw that “main thing” as such a threat, it sent a note to major media outlets, urging them to dump terms like “religious freedom” and “religious liberty” for “religious exemptions.” Read about their directive on Poynter.org and see one New York Times opinion piece that obeyed this instruction to the letter.  

(Tell me: What if a conservative group had sent out a similar missive to mainstream journalists? The Poynter piece, by the way, didn’t include any quotes from media experts who find it problematic that an activist group feels it can tell journalists what to write.)

Fortunately, reporters generally ignored GLAAD's directive. We will start with the Denver Post, the hometown newspaper for both parties in this suit which had a headline that reflected how Kennedy asked “sharp questions” from both sides. It began with a very static lede: 

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments in a Colorado case about a same sex-wedding cake that ultimately could determine where the legal system draws the line between discrimination and religious freedom.


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Do we cover hypocrisy consistently?

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It is my fallen nature that causes me to delight in stories about hypocrisy. We are all hypocrites if we use that term to mean we behave in ways contrary to the ideals we espouse. Technically that’s not what hypocrisy means. Rather it refers to claiming to believe something different than what one believes. Or as Wikipedia puts it “Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have.” It involves deception.


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