JOHN HAGEE UPDATE….Steve Benen remains agog that the press isn’t showing much interest in John Hagee’s endorsement of John McCain:
John McCain actively sought the support of an anti-Catholic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and anti-Semitic televangelist, and despite widespread condemnations from a variety of circles, reporters simply won’t cover the story or push McCain for an explanation. As Andrew Sullivan put it, John Hagee is “a white Farrakhan, but the media has essentially given McCain a pass.”
It’s funny, but in a way I think this is a demonstration of the condescending attitude that a lot of urban reporters have toward evangelicals. Call it the soft bigotry of low expectations. Basically, they figure that these guys are all lunatic nutballs with weird beliefs, and they’re so used to this idea that they give it a pass when it pops into the news. It’s just Uncle Bob. You know how he gets. If they actually took evangelicals seriously, instead of treating them like members of long-lost Amazon tribes, they’d pay more attention to stories like this and they wouldn’t give McCain a free pass on Hagee’s endorsement.
