How would this story get played?

Imagine for a moment that President George W. Bush appointed a Methodist man to be Health and Human Services director. Let’s call him Beselius. Imagined Beselius was mayor of a town where kids were regularly being abused by a fundamentalist Mormon sect, claiming child abuse was their right. Imagine he sided with the sect because he needed their votes. Imagine the United Methodists asked him to recant in order to remain in the good graces of the church, but Beselius refused.

I think that newspapers would run headlines that say:

“Disciplinary Cloud
Shadows Nominee.”

In the story of Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, we have an even more serious matter.

Obama has nominated Sebelius for Health and Human Services. She goes way beyond supporting child abusers. She supports killing unborn children — and her bishop, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, asked her to recant and reconcile or refrain from receiving communion because of it.

So we go to news.google.com to see how this story was covered by the mainstream news media and find that … it wasn’t.

The only coverage it has gotten is religion coverage with stories of the “bishop denounces X” variety.

But tune in to the National Catholic Register’s new print edition on Monday. You’ll see that it’s our lead story in the next issue. And what headline did we put on it?

You guessed it:

“Disciplinary Cloud
Shadows Nominee”