When Journalism Becomes Excuse, Not Accountability
By Luis GonzalezWhat happened this weekend in St. Paul, Minnesota, should horrify every American who cares about religious liberty, civil order, and the constitutional boundaries that hold our civic life together. A group of anti-ICE activists interrupted a Sunday church service, burrowing into a sacred space meant for worship, and former CNN broadcaster Don Lemon wasn’t on the sidelines. He was there with a camera, livestreaming the disruption and, disturbingly, rationalizing it as journalism while he and others bludgeoned aside the very rights they now claim to uphold.
(NY Post)Let’s be clear: there is a profound difference between covering a protest and willingly embedding yourself with a mob that barges into a place of worship, upends a service, and traumatizes parishioners. Lemon’s defense, that he arrived separately, that he was “just chronicling” events, that this was somehow protected by the First Amendment, rings hollow when compared to the footage and his own on-camera comments on the protest. A journalist documents; he did far more than that.
(Newsmax)But the deeper problem isn’t simply one man with a camera. What we’re seeing here is a toxic ideological fusion where
ostensible concern for justice is used to justify the disruption of someone else’s rights. If protest becomes a license to invade others’ spaces, if
the end always justifies the means, then we no longer live in a pluralistic republic but in tribal warfare disguised as activism.
Consider Lemon’s comments on a podcast after the fact, where he characterized churchgoers as “entitled” and connected their perceived entitlement to “white supremacy.” That isn’t reporting, it’s rhetorical weaponization of identity politics to sidestep valid criticism. It’s also a dangerous precedent: label those whose worship you disrupt as bigots, and suddenly the violation of their rights becomes trivial.
(NY Post)Meanwhile, the Justice Department has opened an investigation under laws meant to protect houses of worship from exactly this kind of harassment. That should stop everyone in their tracks. These aren’t merely bad optics; federal statutes like the
FACE Act exist because America once recognized that protected spaces deserve protection against coercion and disruption.
(NY Post)Here’s the rule that should guide us all: Your right to protest does not extend to breaking someone else’s right to worship in peace. Protest outside the building, chant on the sidewalk, make your voices heard in the public square... fine. That’s legitimate, robust public discourse. What is not legitimate is forging spectacle inside someone else’s sanctuary and then calling it journalism or constitutional expression.
The backlash against Lemon is not a smear campaign. It is accountability. And if we’re serious about defending the First Amendment, we can’t cherry-pick when it applies: it protects speech, not trespass; it protects peaceful demonstration, not intimidation and interference with private worship.
Americans of all stripes should be able to agree on this basic point... even if they disagree on immigration policy, on ICE, on policing, on church doctrine. There is no moral high ground in trampling on sacred space; there is only folly and self-righteousness that ends up corroding the very freedoms we claim to champion.
If journalism becomes an excuse for disruption, if it becomes a shield for partisan activism that violates fundamental rights, then the press does not stand as a guardian of liberty but as a participant in its unraveling.
That is the real story here. And America should reject it.
— Gonzo
