The implication, in any case, is that Hagedorn holds such radical positions that he could not possibly be impartial on the state's high court. Never mind that most Christian schools have morality clauses at least for their teachers, including every single diocesan Catholic school. And never mind that the legality of these clauses has been upheld again and again by the courts. The tongue-in-cheek title of my satire? "Breaking News: Court candidate founded a Christian school that required teachers and students to be Christian." Imagine that!
If there were any mud to rake up about Hagedorn's tendency toward bias, surely the Journal would have exposed it. But of course there is no evidence to be found. So my thought last week was, okay, the Journal is a liberal news organ in the state's liberal enclave. Some editor probably saw the similar smear pieces in the Huffington Post and New York Times about Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, returning to teach at a school with a similar policy and thought, hey, I'll bet that we could run an article about Hagedorn along the same lines that would be well received by our liberal readership.
Naive me, I thought that it was "one and done," a single act of irresponsible journalism, and I had a little fun satirizing it. But this week the Wisconsin State Journal ran a second hit piece, this time picked up from the Associated Press. This week's crime du jour? Apparently Hagedorn delivered a few paid speeches at events for law students organized by Alliance Defending Freedom, which has, according to the article, "supported criminalizing sodomy, likened homosexuality to pedophilia and argued in favor of sterilizing transgender people."
Okay, maybe I'm getting tired of satire, but this is now officially an ongoing smear campaign with such obvious bias and such blatant virtue-signaling that it makes me want to retch. ADF is a highly respected legal organization that has done more than any other conservative group to defend religious freedoms in the courts in recent years. Notably, ADF lawyers have won all nine cases they've argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. They're the firm that won Hobby Lobby an exemption from Obamacare a few years ago. But from the latest hit piece, you'd think that they were an anti-intellectual fringe hate group. After all, that's how the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled them.
The substance of the SPLC's designation of ADF as a "hate group," by the way, comes from the legal work of ADF's international sister organization, not the work of its lawyers here in the United States. A number of European Union countries had required, on medical grounds, sterilization for the recognition of a person's gender transition. ADF's international organization was involved in the support of the laws on the books, and somehow that support has morphed, in the eyes of the SPLC, into ADF being a "hate group" crusading to sterilize transgender people. It's a designation that has been useful in smearing the work of the ADF, and now it's apparently useful in smearing Hagedorn's campaign. All because he was paid a grand total of $3,000 over the course of a few years for career advice he gave to law students at ADF gatherings.
Maybe we've gone too far down the path of opinions masquerading as balanced journalism for anybody to get up in arms about this. But still, it's so blatant, and so obvious, that the Wisconsin State Journal is out to "get" Hagedorn that I am wondering why there's even an attempt to make these pieces look like journalism. To be clear, I know nothing of Hagedorn. I haven't even done enough reading about him to know whether he'd win my vote. But I do know a little about journalism. And this isn't it.
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