MSM is very very good to certain activists. Barry Lynn, the leader of Americans for Separation of Church and State gets a lot of air time. So does Michael Newdow. The former is a professed Christian pressing for the suppression of Christian expression in the public square, the former is an atheist demanding the same.
They both have common targets, however. In every case they aim their hand against conservative Christians in their ideological war. But they're selective in that they conveniently ignore the more liberal elements.
When Bono met with the pope, it was a major news event for the MSM. But the message of Bono's visit was patently clear: he wanted the pope to issue edicts that would influence Catholics in all nations, including the United States, to lobby their leaders to the kind of socialist, one world "utopia" that Bono envisions by implicitly threatening them with a rather uncomfortable afterlife if they didn't comply. Put simply, Bono wanted the ethics and morals of the Catholic church to guide US foreign policy.
In the world of secularists, however, Bono's visit made little more noise than a butterfly fart. Bono's proposal threatened a greater infringement of the SPIRIT of the law than ANYTHING Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson ever proposed.
Similarly, when liberals hold hands and use their religious philosophies to try to end the death penalty or to demonstrate for peace, the separation of church and state activists remain silent.
I am not saying there is anything wrong OR right with the ideological stances of any of these positions. I have my own well thought out positions, and if you've read my blog regularly and haven't figured them out, I don't know how I can get the message across any clearer. But those ideological stances do not belong in the topic of this article, and they certainly should not be the basis for me blackmailing representatives of a SECULAR government into making my RELIGIOUS beliefs into law.
I believe in separation of church and state, very strongly. But a cross on the side of the highway isn't a church/state issue. A nativity scene erected on a PUBLIC square by a PRIVATE entity is also not a church/state issue, provided other faiths are granted equal access. When someone's lobbying the pope to exercise his spiritual muscle to change US foreign policy, that IS a church/state issue. And the same groups speaking out about conservatives should speak just as loudly about liberals who do the same.