What MSM thinks about conservative Christians.

I am not the smartest, nor am I the most educated man around. I think that over the process of my education I learned that a couple means two, a few means three, several means four or more. The New York Times, Kirkpatrick and Stolberg, have written an attack piece not only on the Republican Senate Majority Leader but also on the right he has to speak to a conservative gathering of church leaders.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/politics/22frist.html

"April 21 – "As the Senate battle over judicial confirmations became increasingly entwined with religious themes, officials of several major Protestant denominations on Thursday accused the Senate Republican leader, Bill Frist, of violating the principles of his own Presbyterian church and urged him to drop out of a Sunday telecast that depicts Democrats as "against people of faith.""

The National Council of Churches is one group of Protestant Christians they list. The second, bringing it to a couple of major Protestant denominations, is the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Nope, I think we are back to one group again.
I think this one makes a couple, "Among those scheduled to speak in the conference call is the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick, a top official of the Presbyterian Church U.S.A., in which Dr. Frist is an active member.", or is he part of the National Council of Churches? I just can’t be sure about that so I will give the NY Times a couple at this point.

Then as the last of the "several" major Protestant denominations that are quoted:

"We're going to allow the majority leader to invoke faith to rewrite Senate rules, to put substandard, extremist judges on the bench?"

Wasn’t Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat and former presidential nominee in a fire storm of his own about if his priest should give him communion or not? I must have missed one of the biggest stories in this time of the new Pope Benedict XVI, Kerry converting to the Protestant faith. Well he did preach his brand of faith from every pulpit he could find last fall.

So let us look at totals here for the, "several major Protestant denominations" in this very carefully reported NY Times article. First, the National Council of Churches is not the governing body of the Protestant faith. It is a council of elected or appointed representatives of various denominations of Protestants that gather to facilitate communication between Protestant denominations. So unless the NY Times is using the "several" by counting each member of the National Council of Churches, their information is not correct.

Second, I don’t think the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism is a major Protestant denomination. I don’t think that Christ rates all that high in Judaism even in these liberal/progressive times. So, if Kerry is their third source for the "several" Protestants, I think they failed in their efforts and this should have been on the opinion/editorial page, not on the Washington page at all. They are left with one "leader" of one Protestant church.

If the NY Times expects to keep readership, they need to keep op-ed separate from reporting. To top it off, sloppy reporting from two of their "respected" people is unacceptable.

My last question is, where do they get off telling one of the elected leaders of the United States of America he should/can not address any group of citizens? Oh, I forgot. Conservative Christians aren’t citizens or at least not the same high level of citizenship as progressive/liberal Americans.