They’re in the eye of the beholder….the bullseye, when the media are concerned. And they are concerned…

George Weigel zeroes in.

On November 3, Ken Cuccinelli was elected attorney general of Virginia in a landslide. His 15% margin of victory strongly suggests that Old Dominion voters were unimpressed by a shrill Washington Post editorial published on October 30, which opined that Mr. Cuccinelli “would likely become an embarrassment for the commonwealth” as his “affability and quick wit…have tended to mask his extremist views.”

What, you ask, were those “extremist views”? Well, the Post’s indictment — in an editorial titled “Mr. Cuccinelli’s bigotry” — centered on the fact that candidate Cuccinelli had described homosexual behavior as contrary to “natural law” and had further suggested that natural law was a useful guide to public policy. Mr. Cuccinelli did not propose to prosecute, much less jail, every gay and lesbian between the Potomac River and the North Carolina border, and no sane person thought he intended to do so. Yet the Post’s anonymous editorial writer described Mr. Cuccinelli’s appeal to natural law as a “retrofit [of] the old language of racism, bias, and intolerance in a new context.”

Baloney. What’s being retrofitted here is old-time anti-Catholic bigotry, tarted up in the guise of tolerance and extended to those who think there are moral truths built into the world and into us — truths that we can grasp by reason.

The natural law. Which got knocked around quite a bit during the Senate confirmation (which turned out to be the denial) hearings of Judge Robert Bork. It’s the ‘ought’ in what we ought to do to behave well and take care of others, which can be reasoned “in a public vocabulary, accessible to all,” Weigel clarifies.

That’s the grammar and vocabulary of the natural moral law: the basis on which Thomas Jefferson argued the case for American national independence, Martin Luther King, Jr., promoted the civil rights of African Americans, and John Paul II passionately and effectively defended the religious and political rights of all…

On the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1989, it was a sadness that the editors of the Washington Post misread the moral texture of the American founding, the civil rights revolution, and the revolution of conscience that brought down the Berlin Wall — revolutions in which believers, non-believers, skeptics, and agnostics united in defense of human rights that could be known as such through the natural moral law.

But known only by minds open to reason. Hard to find in the tribal cult that pervades big media editorial rooms.