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The 'conservative Star Tribune'? In 1993?

By David Brauer | 02/10/11

The lefties over at Think Progress have charted Tim Pawlenty's shifting views on gay rights, which Brooklyn blogger Elon Green judges "generally regressive."

It's a worthwhile exercise, but begins with a whopper that will make locals do a spit-take:

● 1993: Pawlenty voted to extend protection to gays and lesbians under the state Human Rights Act, effectively banning discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation as well as race, religion, ethnicity and physical or mental disability. (The conservative Star Tribune wrote “the bill would destroy family values and give official sanction to an immoral lifestyle.”)

Say what you will about the Strib's coverage these days, but few would call the 1993 version "conservative." Even if you disagree, it's hard to imagine the paper judging a civil rights bill so harshly, either in an editorial or news coverage.

And, of course, they didn't. Here's staff writer Donna Halvorsen's March 19, 1993 front-page lede:

Fending off arguments that passing a gay-rights bill would destroy family values and give official sanction to an immoral lifestyle, the Minnesota Senate and House voted Thursday to extend protection to gays and lesbians under the state Human Rights Act.

Squabbling over the Strib's ideological course is best left to locals, Elon.

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Comments (2)

Submitted by Paul Udstrand on February 10, 2011 - 10:23am.

The conservative vs. liberal bias debate can be a complex issue. I'm a local, and I was referring to the Strib as conservative at the time. You have to remember that such terms in progressive circles refer to the conservative tendency to support the status quo, not necessarily promote a conservative political agenda. It has always been fashionable to refer to the "liberal" media in the US. While many US journalists may be liberals of sorts, the idea that the media trends liberal has always been a convenient myth. Several studies have been done over the decades that have demonstrated a media aversion to challenging status quo corporate assumptions at any given time. The most succinct treatment of this observation is probably Chomsky and Herman's book: "Manufacturing Constent:The Political Economy of the Mass Media". The Strib has always fit the model of a typical neo-liberal corporate media production. The fact that such a description strikes so many people as odd simply demonstrates how narrowly construed the concepts of liberal and conservative are in the US. A paper the the Strib can be described as "liberal" if you compare it to the Wall Street Journal, but you have to remember progressives would compare it to The Nation and Z-Magazine, against which it looks quite conservative.

Submitted by Dick Novack on February 12, 2011 - 12:12pm.

I find more interesting

"Pawlenty voted to extend protection to gays and lesbians under the state Human Rights Act, effectively banning discrimination in housing and employment based on sexual orientation...."

if one is to also consider that he, Tim Pawlenty, is against the same persons sharing joint medical, pension, inheritance, tax treatment, life-decisionmaking, and so forth.

[So there is no mistake - I support marriage as ONLY between a man and woman and believe, as is supported by studies, that non-standard families produce a high percentage of troubled and unachieveing kids. But I also for 4 decades have not understood why people who choose to live together can not share joint living benefits of society - as have over the years many retiree and many low-mid income singles simply for convenience and/or friendship without being GLBT, just as friends sharing life as a convenience.]