lifesite news--you're outta here

I watched a bit of the Toronto Blue Jays game yesterday. The Big Hurt, Frank Thomas, got tossed for disputing a third-strike call. Frank has been in baseball a long time and should have known better than to show up an ump in that fashion. In addition, Thomas is normally a soft-spoken and thoughtful person. But he lost it this time, and he paid.

Athletes are thrown out of games for many reasons. In last night's Canucks-Oilers game (which, speaking as an ardent Canucks fan, was heartbreaking), Oiler Mathieu Roy received a game misconduct for a vicious boarding infraction. Violent and ugly incidents are the more common reason for ejections than arguing a called strike.

Donning my referee's uniform for a moment, I am afraid that I have reached the end of my patience with lifesitenews.com. I have been letting it run on my blog for some time now. It does carry a lot of news about life issues that one wouldn't come across in mainstream media. But it has a negative side to it that I find quite troubling at times. I received this comment from a regular reader of this blog earlier this year:

This isn't so much a comment on this particular post as on the fact that your side banner seems to endorse lifesitenews.com - a site whose agenda seems strangely mixed and rather biased. Your blog is so thoughtful and non-judgmental that I wonder about your flagging up of that one, much more judgmental, site in particular? Any thoughts would be appreciated. Lots of gay people, for example, are on the "life" side of the "life" issue, and yet the lifesite website ostracizes those people in a way that seems unthoughtful (of course, isn't ostracising always unthoughtful?). I would like to know why you endorse that website in particular? Thank you.

Lifesite News is not the only pro-life site around that strikes a rather belligerent stance. It seems almost endemic with bloggers that stridency, sweeping generalizations, name-calling, and other aggressive tactics are not only acceptable but necessary. I for one have always thought that consistent, principled reasoning was the best form of persuasion, not mudslinging and stereotyping. [I realize that such behaviour is routine in the Canadian Parliament, but that sorry reality hardly justifies such approaches.]

There are spokespeople such as Prof. Margaret Somerville who are regularly quoted in the mainstream media because of their thoughtful and incisive analysis of life issues. The publishers of Pro Woman Pro Life, to the limited extent that I have perused the site, seem to be attempting to take a balanced approach. There are a handful of others. But the blogosphere generally is pretty negative, without much thoughtful reasoning.

What particularly offends me about Lifesite News is their gay bashing. I'm a married man with two children, so I'm not defending my own orientation. I just know too many gay men and women who are far removed from the picture that Lifesite News paints, and certainly don't deserve the stereotyping that is ladled out on that site.

As a practicing Christian, I have always been struck by the phrase "They'll know we are Christians by our love." I'm far from perfect in living up to this challenge, but the attempt must be made. Jesus said that we are to "love our enemies." I'm not picking up much love in Lifesite News.

So with the greatest respect for what you are attempting to do, you're outta here.