{"id":1326,"date":"2005-01-25T22:59:21","date_gmt":"2005-01-26T06:59:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/25\/a-darn-it-defense-of-maggie-gallagher\/"},"modified":"2005-01-25T22:59:21","modified_gmt":"2005-01-26T06:59:21","slug":"a-darn-it-defense-of-maggie-gallagher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1326","title":{"rendered":"A (darn it!) defense of Maggie Gallagher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maggie Gallagher, a newspaper columnist who has written frequently about the marriage movement (and also against same-sex marriage), accepted $20,000 from the Federal Government<\/a> in 2002 to write materials promoting the Bush administration’s Marriage Initiative. Meanwhile, she failed to disclose that interesting fact to her readers even while she preached the benefits of the Bush Initiative to them.<\/p>\n

Now she claims that it never even occurred to her that there was a conflict of interest there. Frankly, I think Maggie’s too smart for that, but I guess even the smartest among us can overlook the obvious.<\/p>\n

Maggie is a leading writer (perhaps the <\/em>leading writer) against same-sex marriage, so I’d be delighted to see her discredited. No one has less interest in her defense than me. Nonetheless, this is not a big deal. Why? Because, given Maggie’s work before 2002, there is no question in my mind that she would have supported Bush’s marriage initiative – and supported it in column after column after column – even if they never paid her a cent.<\/p>\n

Nor is this like the other recent right-wing-Journalist-taking-federal-money scandal, because Maggie was not being paid to to put certain content in her newspaper columns or to try and talk up the initiative among other journalists. She was being paid to write pamphlets and speeches for the federal government, which she did. Presumably, they would have paid her even if she had quit writing her column; Armstrong Williams cannot say the same.<\/p>\n

Should she have disclosed? Yes. Does this make her an illegitimate and untrustworthy source, like Armstrong Williams?<\/p>\n

Alas, no.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maggie Gallagher, a newspaper columnist who has written frequently about the marriage movement (and also against same-sex marriage), accepted $20,000 from the Federal Government in 2002 to write materials promoting the Bush administration’s Marriage Initiative. Meanwhile, she failed to disclose … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-same-sex-marriage"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}