Newsweek is written on a Fourth Grade level.

The Newsweek "Belief" reporter, Lisa Miller, has written a piece on "taking conservative religious people" seriously in their "biblical" approach to marriage. Along the way, she reveals that she has virtually no knowledge concerning her subject and very little curiosity on the same, which explains why she is as ignorant as she is.

Molly Hemingway's deconstruction of the cover story ends with this:

And yet preach with unhinged emotion is precisely what Miller does. She never once speaks with an actual opponent of same-sex marriage. She never once speaks with someone who knows anything about the Biblical model of marriage as understood for thousands of years. This piece is disgusting, unfair and unworthy of a high school graduate. It is the opposite of thought-provoking. It’s a post-frontal lobotomy exegesis of Scripture. This is journalism? This is how people are supposed to cover the news, today?

She actually uses Miss Manners to defend liturgical changes in marital rites. I mean, really. This is a serious topic. We have had the majority populace of three dozen states now vote to define marriage as a heterosexual union. I know the news industry is suffering but perhaps one reporter could go actually research what these people think.

Instead we learn nothing about the principled opposition to same-sex marriage and instead get blasphemy and some of the most cliched reading of Scripture to appear in print. Thanks, Newsweek. Thanks a bunch.

Miller seems to do a lot of this. In a piece on abortion, she offers this intelligence-devouring solipsistic observation:

Before the election I wrote a piece for NEWSWEEK.com about white evangelicals and abortion. In that piece, I predicted that conservative Christians would not move in large numbers away from the Republican Party because of their fundamental theological and cultural objections to abortion. In response, I received many comments—mostly the usual entrenched rhetoric on both sides. But embedded in the comment boards was a surprising point of view: a tiny fraction of readers objected to the relentless framing of the pro-life arguments in religious terms. The case against abortion could be made without God, they said. Atheists could be pro-life.

What a phenomenally sheltered life Miller must have led - protected against philosophy, history, the liberal arts - for her never to have heard of Natural Law, which is, like, you know, in the Declaration of Independence.

One suspects that Miller has a journalism degree and prides herself on her inquiring and skeptical mind, but she seems to have never actually read any of the many works that base the anti-abortion argument on concepts of natural law or human equality. It is as if she is mired in a cartoon debate where the people on what I imagine is her side of the argument regularly route the predictably confused arguments based on scripture.

As Molly Hemingway asks, this is journalism?