McConnell: I'd fill a SCOTUS vacancy during 2020 election

[Benton]

(05-29-2019, 12:21 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I'd say both, but I also think the locations in this country in which we reside affect this perception.

Only to a degree.

There's a lot of pulpit governing in the Bluegrass on both sides. The last town I worked in, churches outnumbered restaurants 3-1. The town I live in is a bit more urban... we've got two churches to every one restaurant. So that explains a lot of it. But not all.

Nearly every week over the last several years, somebody would email or call trying to influence stories. Sometimes it's 'don't run a story about my husband beating me and getting the cops called on him' or it's 'you need to do a story because the u10 soccer coach is gay.' There's nothing partisan in that, but it was overwhelmingly the right (or at least people asking for stories from that side) making those requests for stories or to squelch stories.

I think overall it's just the mindset of the party, and that's not confined to one state or the other. For a while now the GOP has been using 'safety and security concerns' to prohibit free speech and exercising religion. You've got no shortage of Republican lawmakers advocating for scrapping a free press because they say not nice things about them.

I don't like the common left view of trying to prohibit terms, but I don't see some hairy legged ethics professor at a rally asking for a more gender neutral phrase as the same kind of problem as lawmakers in office trying to restrict religious rights or verbally attacking reporters.