AKA William

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I love Media Matters. I love what they do, and I love how they do it. But Media Matter’s Jamison Foser’s condemnation of Contessa Brewer’s use of the phrase “traditional marriage” during her introduction and interviews with Sarah Dowling and Linda Wolfe and later Bishop Harry Jackson about the results of the Maine’s Question 1, Media Matters misses Brewer’s larger point. Foser writes:

“Define marriage traditionally” is straight out of the anti-gay movement’s talking points. They work the phrase (and variations of it) into everything they say about the subject.

. . . If Brewer had introduced the segment by saying that Maine voted to “discriminate against gays,” you can be sure the Right would be apoplectic — and other reporters would point to it as evidence that MSNBC is a left-wing channel.

But that isn’t what happened. What actually happened was that Brewer adopted anti-gay talking points as though they were neutral descriptions.

The thing is, in both interviews, Brewer is obviously in support of marriage equality. She gave a nuanced interview with the lesbian couple, and then she went after Bishop Jackson’s homophobic hypocrisy, hard.

I watched both interviews live yesterday, and I was struck at how thoughtfully sympathetic Brewer — who grew up in Maine — was to our fight for marriage equality. I even posted both interviews to end the day yesterday.

Brewer did use the phrase “traditional marriage,” but she used it almost in quotation marks, as if she were quoting the anti-LGBT side.

Watch both short interviews and see what I mean.