All the Ideology That's Fit to Print

The New York Times executive editor, Bill Keller, has announced that the paper must get more "diverse", and hire more conservatives and write more about religion.

Can you say, "complete capitulation?" Sad, really.

Billmon breaks it down: The Red State Times

And so we're starting to get reporting like this (taken from the Times Magazine's recent kissy face look at religious conservatives):

But as I learned spending time among the cultural conservatives who are leading the anti-gay-marriage charge, they have their own reasons for doing so, which are based on their reading of the Bible, their views about both homosexuality and the institution of marriage and the political force behind the issue . . . As with abortion, conservatives see gay marriage as a culture-altering change being implemented by judicial fiat.

This is followed by a seemingly endless spew of bigotry and lies -- more than 8,000 words worth -- all dressed up in that Times Voice of the Narrator God prose style. This includes passages such as:

''Lifestyle'' is a buzzword in conservative Christian circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that homosexuality is not an innate condition but a hedonistic way of living, one devoted to partying, drugs and wanton sex that ends, often, in illness and early death.

And:

At its essence, then, the Christian conservative thinking about gay marriage runs this way. Homosexuality is not an innate, biological condition but a disease in society. Marriage is the healthy root of society. To put the two together is thus willfully to introduce disease to that root.

And:

Once the definition of marriage is altered, in this view, you will have this group of people declaring they want to marry that group; middle-aged men will exchange vows with children or with Doberman pinschers.

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This is shameful reporting, especially coming from a paper that, for all its faults, aggressively and at times courageously covered the civil rights movement -- at a time when most Americans (and not just Southerners) either supported segregation or just wished the issue would go away.

It's as if the New York Times of, say, 1963, had published a long, respectful essay on the racial views of Sheriff Bull Connor and the White Citizens Council, one that relegated Martin Luther King to the second-to-the-last paragraph, but included extended passages along the lines of:

''States Rights'' is a buzzword in conservative Southern circles. It's a signal of the belief, and the policy position, that blacks are slow, stupid and lazy, and want nothing more than to collect welfare payments and rape white women.

Or:

At its essence, then, Southern conservative thinking about race relations runs this way. God intended for the races to be separate. Racial mixing results in miscegenation. Segregation is the root of the Southern way of life and to abolish it would be willfully to introduce disease to that root

.

Echidne of the Snakes: New York Times: The Wingnut Edition

In other words, the Gray Lady is on her knees (take that as you wish). The wingnuts have won. I used to hear the argument that true diversity is not racial and gender based but the acknowledgement of wingnut views (such as that minorities are lazy and women naturally unable to compete) on each and every issue. But I only heard this from wingnuts. Now the New York Times is repeating the same mantra.