Word: biases
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...before slaughter, Britain and most countries allow exemptions on religious grounds. Spain, for example, permits the religious slaughter of sheep and goats, but not beef. It's this loophole that the F.A.W.C., a government advisory body, wants to close. Muslim and Jewish leaders say the proposal smacks of cultural bias, and the shared threat has forged an unlikely alliance between them. At London's Central Mosque last week, some sat down together to plan their response. The Reverend Alan Greenblatt, representing Britain's Chief Rabbi, spoke for everyone when he said, "To use an appropriate metaphor, I'm stunned...
...that the war on terror has prompted unfair scrutiny of their way of life, also question the F.A.W.C. motives. "It's most disturbing," says Aziz Pasha, head of the Union of Muslim Organizations. "Why are we going through this again?" F.A.W.C. chair Judy MacArthur Clark rejects any claim of bias, saying such allegations are "just mischief-making. We're looking at the issue purely from an animal-welfare aspect." She also stresses that the report - the F.A.W.C.'s second in 17 years to call for an end to slaughter without stunning - has been in the works for four years. Similar...
...then? Take your pick. There are the perennial charges of bias, which grow louder the more bitterly split the electorate gets. But there's also the problem that many big-media journalists are now cautious, well-paid conformists distant from their audiences and more responsive to urban elites, powerful people and megacorporations--especially the ones they work for. Hence the bland news anchors who verge on self-parody; magazines so commercial they're practically catalogs; timid pack journalism (We love dotcoms too! I mean, we never believed in them either!); local newscasts shilling for their corporate parents ("Up next...
...same goes for all of us. We can root out every error, every plagiarist, every bias--but it won't do any good if we replace them with a gutless inoffensiveness. We've spent a month being worried that our readers and viewers hate us because they think we're liars. Relax, brethren; they don't. They hate us because they think we're phonies...
There's also the plausible theory that the ruling doesn't conflict with earlier Rehnquist decisions that states are exempt from Congress's age and disability antidiscrimination laws; women have more constitutional protections against bias. Rehnquist's next chance to show his soft side: the court will decide this month whether to hear the disabilities-discrimination case of a Tennessee amputee who had to drag himself up the steps of a non--handicapped-accessible courthouse. --By Viveca Novak