They tend to parrot popular Christianity which reveals no awareness of the last 200 years of biblical and theological scholarship. It is hard, therefore, to blame the media for this, since many clergy appear to be equally uninformed.

CBS a couple of years ago, for example, did a feature on the supposed appearances of Mary. They interviewed people who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin. No one dared suggest that this might be subjective, hallucinatory material. Nor did they note that no one has any idea what the mother of Jesus looked like. The Mary that the faithful tend to see is the carefully cultivated medieval portrait of Mary adopted by the church.

No biblical scholar is a fundamentalist. Yet fundamentalists, sporting degrees from a variety of unaccredited Bible Institutions, are given vast media exposure where no one challenges their distortions or the absolute ignorance that they reveal. No one would quote a doctor or a scientist with those bogus credentials.

In another example clergy constantly discuss homosexuality with no knowledge about it at all and having made no effort to look at the massive scientific data that challenge their stereotypes. I do not know why the media treats the prejudices of religious leaders as worthy of having their uninformed ignorance disseminated to the wider public.

What qualifies church leaders to pose as experts on sexual issues? Was the church not the institution that said that celibacy is the path to holiness, that marriage is a compromise with sin, that women are inherently unequal and that homosexuality is a choice rather than an awakening?

Not one of those definitions would stand any psychological testing process. Only a distorted view of fairness would deter a good reporter from asking the hard and obvious questions about religion and its attempt to control the debate about sexual morality. No one should be allowed to pretend that quoting the Bible is an appropriate way to deal with any issue.