An Afternoon at Congress

Roy Adams reports in the Adventist Review on a couple of Congressional hearings last month. He was there to hear James Standish and others testify on behalf of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act. He got there a little early, and managed to hear testimony before a different committee: Jamie Leigh Jones telling of her experience of rape as an KBR employee in Iraq.

The hearing room was quiet, with no swarming battery of reporters and photographers. I got home too late for the evening news that day, but I would hazard there was nothing on it about Jones and her tragedy, let alone anything about the severe hardship and discrimination cases documented by Standish and the Jewish and Muslim witnesses. The day following, however, a Congressional hearing on the use of steroids in baseball would see the media falling all over itself to cover it, with sizeable chunks of airtime on the evening news—which also featured Uno, the beagle that took Best in Show at a dog contest in New York’s Madison Square Garden.