UPDATE: Fox News jumps on the book-banning bandwagon

Fox News continues to doggedly follow one Tennessee activist's quest to ban a high school science text book for alleged “bias” against Christians, lending him not only some free publicity but their moral support as well.

Yesterday on Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade told Kurt Zimmermann, the Tennessee man who wants to ban the text book for calling the Judeo-Christian creation story a “myth,” that he's a “good example of somebody who saw something and you're taking action, and that's a great example for your kid.” Zimmerman was back on Fox News this morning, talking with America's Newsroom hosts Bill Hemmer and Martha MacCallum about his meetings with the local school board and how he's just trying to protect the fragile minds of today's youth from corruption.

As I wrote yesterday, it's wholly inappropriate for a news organization to endorse the banning of educational materials based on the religious objections of a local activist. But that's exactly what MacCallum did at the end of the interview, saying “good for him” and pontificating on what would happen if some other religion were called a “myth,” implicating a supposed double standard, but not really explaining what she was talking about.

“Imagine if other religions had the word 'myth' next to them in a text book.” I'm generally not a fan of hypotheticals, but I'm pretty confident as to what would happen on Fox News if a certain tenet of, say, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism were labeled a “myth” in a text book -- absolutely nothing. Certainly not two fawning interviews in two days with an agitated Islamic/Buddhist/Hindu activist demanding the book be banned.

If Fox were to do something, they would more than likely rally to the book's defense, such is their well-established position that the Christian faith is constantly under assault and in need of defending, whereas other faiths are weird and dangerous.