McCain Rejects Hagee's Endorsement

John McCain on Thursday rejected the endorsements of two controversial pastors, John Hagee and Rod Parsley.  McCain gave up the months-old endorsement of Hagee after a recording surfaced in which the pastor portrayed Adolf Hitler as being sent by God to force Jews “to come back to the land of Israel.”  Then in an interview with The Associated Press, McCain said he rejected Parsley's support, too. The revelation of these incendiary comments by ABC News was undoubtedly the tipping point, which motivated McCain to renounce Hagee’s endorsement and repudiate the comments. McCain had stopped short of rejecting the endorsements before—even as Hagee and Parsley’s anti-gay comments were swirling around the blogospere and in a few mainstream media outlets.

And since Hagee’s endorsement earlier this year, McCain has only occasionally commented on the pastor’s statements including a claim by Hagee that Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgment against the city of New Orleans for hosting a gay pride parade.  At one point during a bus tour in late April, he snapped at a reporter, calling the Hagee controversy "nonsense."

Most mainstream media have rarely mentioned Hagee’s anti-gay comments, and have remained silent on Parsley’s, despite a constant stream of reports documenting the two pastors.  A few outlets however, such as MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” continued to hammer away at Hagee's anti-gay comments.

The media coverage of the Hagee and Parsley controversies underscores a degree to which anti-gay rhetoric is still not always given equal scrutiny by news media – a fact that will hopefully change as media professionals increasingly take note of the extreme anti-gay attitudes that still exist in mainstream politics.

Cindi Creager is the Director of National News