(Note: a couple of hours after I posted this diary, it was reported that Elizabeth Murray, the reporter who wrote this story, had been laid off as part of a companywide cutback at Gannett. She’d just been hired a month ago. Harsh!

My diary still stands; my complaint is with the Freeploid’s editorial choices, not the reporter’s work.)

It’s pretty obvious that someone in the Burlington Free Press hierarchy has a very Catholic bug in his/her bonnet. As I’ve chronicled in the past, our Freeploid went (forgive me, Father, for I am about to sin) absolutely balls to the wall with its coverage of Pope Benedict’s retirement and, later, with its even more comprehensive coverage of his successor’s election.

Well, the Freeploid — or is it the Burlington Catholic Reporter — has done it again, with its front page devoted to Vermonters’ reactions to Pope Francis’ comments about gay people. No actual Vermont news, then, I take it?

The headline is pretty much all you have to read:

Wow. What a shocker. “Mixed views,” huh? Never saw that coming.

The story begins at a small midweek Mass at the Cathedral of the Buggered Altar Boy — er, I mean, The Immaculate Conception. Handy spot to gather comments from devout Catholics, for sure. And one member of the flock, Caroline Rood, supplied the reporter with a fervent endorsement of Pope Frank. (And posed for a very touching front-page picture of herself at prayer.)

(At least I assume she posed; the alternative is that the reporter was actually taking pictures during the Mass, which would be impolite and irreverent. And we can’t have that.)

There followed a recap of the Pope’s astoundingly non-Medieval “Who am I to judge?” statement, and then Vermont Bishop Salvatore Matano throwing a bathtub’s worth of cold water on the whole thing:

“As priests, we are expected to fulfill the virtue of chastity… Young persons are called to realize the intimacy reserved to those who are married is not a prerogative to be assumed by others in extramarital relationships.”

In other words, NO SEX FOR YOU, HORRIBLE GAY PERSON.

And only after all of that — the celebration of Mass, the comments of a devout Cathollic, the recap of Francis’ statement, and Bishop Matano’s ruler-smack across the knuckles — do we finally hear from a non-Catholic.

In the twelfth paragraph of the story.

After the jump: a celebrant’s intolerance.

There we find Kim Fountain of the RU12? Community Center, who expressed doubt that the Church was going to actually change any time soon. Again, not exactly Pulitzer Prize stuff here.

After that, we return to Caroline Rood, our earnest Catholic, who turns out to have shared some amazingly regressive (and inaccurate) views on homosexuality:

Rood said she honors the fact that homosexuality exists, but she thinks much of it is an experiment, and people should not act on a same-sex preference – especially gay priests, who have taken a vow of celibacy.

“I think personally that the entire gay/homosexual movement is very trendy, and I think it has attracted an enormous amount of people who are not at all gay,” Rood said.

Bwahahahahaha. Yeah, sure. I’ve been straight all my life, but this morning I read a lifestyle article on The Gay Wedding Boom and now I can’t wait to suck a cock.

Somehow the Freeploid decided to bury Rood’s ignorant bigotry deep in the article, while it happily trumpeted her faith on the front page.

By itself, this article wouldn’t be worth commenting on. But it’s part of a trend: the Freeploid providing acres of skewed coverage of Catholicism by resorting to the old cliche “Vermonters React To…”

Somehow, though, we don’t see big front-page stories on Vermonters reacting to the Syrian Civil War or the Middle East peace talks or Anthony Weiner’s wiener or anything else under the sun. The Freeploid seems to reserve this ploy for only one particular institution.

I ask again, why does the Burlington Free Press — the biggest, if not the best, newspaper in an extremely liberal and secular state — devote so much attention to the Roman Catholic Church?