WaPo's conservative beat reporter: Gay marriage opponents are "bigots"

Perhaps Weigel will turn out two decades from now to have been prescient, but “bigot” is awfully strong language for a person who is making the case for tolerance – and this comment simply reinforced a longstanding view among social conservatives that The Washington Post and most of the rest of the mainstream media are not only implacably opposed to their policy agenda, but personally hostile to them as well.

(Disclosure: I like Dave Weigel. I’ve had him on my podcast several times. He has written about me in the past, and I have found him accurate and fair. So it gives me no joy to write about this.)

But opposition to gay marriage is hardly a fringe movement. A majority of Americans tell pollsters they are opposed to it, a number that, if you take him at face value, includes President Obama. Presumably Weigel would also count as “bigots” the 70 percent of African-Americans who backed Proposition 8 in California.