It's Like the Race Issue:

(Maybe that should be plural, but …) Where are the real conservatives? I don't mean the idiot tea partiers or the I'm-against-anything-a-Democrat-is-for clowns in congress. I'm talking about people who drive defensively, who say, "Wait a minute, let's take a closer look at this."

Ross Douthat falls into this last category when he points out that allowing a public debate on religion isn't an unreasonable thing to do. Douthat argues that when Brit Hume was asked about what advice he would give golfer Tiger Woods concerning his recent image problems resulting from his sexual problems and Hume responded by advocating for his own religious beliefs Hume was not out of bounds.

The argument shifted, of course, from a comparison about the relative merits of various religious beliefs to the notion that a newsman should not be advocating a particular religious belief even when he was simply a member of a panel and not in fact reporting the news.

The problem was further acerbated by the fact that the panel discussion was taking place on Fox News, a cable outlet whose purpose is to broadcast propaganda that will serve the money interests of its owner, Ruppert Murdoch, in his pursuit to aggregate all of the world's wealth into one mountainous pile to be hidden in a cave of his choosing where he can sit on it.

The long and short of it is that Douthat's take on the conversation is the most reasonable one I've encountered, although why any of us—other than Buick and so forth—be concerned about Tiger Woods' peccadilloes is beyond me.