One of CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman’s favorite right-wing clergymen (who’s not Catholic, anyway) is Franklin Graham, who hates gays and Muslims as much as he does. Chapman loves publishing Graham’s rants, and will never criticize him for going to far or for contradicting himself.
For instance, in a Aug. 9 blog post, Chapman touted Graham’s attack on New York Times columnist Frank Bruni for being critical of Vice President Mike Pence’s right-wing Christianity, which he called “slanderous” and “vile.” Chapman himself piled on by claim that Bruni was making “tawdry claims” (though he cites only one complete sentence from it and fragments and single words elsewhere, which is journalistically tawdry) and tried to denigrate Bruni as “openly homosexual and a militant promoter of the LGBT agenda” (his proof for the latter is a column of Bruni’s in which he argues that Christians shouldn’t hate gays — what a sinister “agenda”!).
Just 11 days later, an Aug. 20 blog post by Craig Bannister detailed Graham’s freakout over Chelsea Clinton claiming that abortion has added money to the economy because women were able to work: “What a lie. Hitler probably also claimed that killing the Jews would be good for their economy.”
Isn’t likening someone — and not just anyone, the daughter of a former president — to Hitler just as slanderous and vile as and what he claimed Bruni wrote about Pence? Is going Godwin a good idea for someone who claims to be a man of God (not to mention an admission that he had no better argument)?
Chapman and Bannister will never ask those questions. Graham served up the conservatively correct goods, and that’s all that matters.