In late August, the Washington Post's Style section featured a friendly profile of National Organization for Marriage executive director Brian Brown. The profile, by Post writer Monica Hesse, portrayed Brown and NOM as a “rational” “sane” “mainstream” organization, and their critics as shrill and vitriolic. In order to portray Brown in such a friendly light, Hesse omitted evidence of their history of gay-bashing, and excluded any criticism of the organization.

Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander agreed with complaints that the piece was one-sided, as did Style editor Lynn Medford:

[I]t deprived readers of hearing from others who have battled Brown and find him uncivil and bigoted. To them, he represents injustice. They should have been heard, at length.

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In retrospect, Style editor Lynn Medford agrees. “The lesson is to always, in some way, represent the other side,” she said.

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Compounding the story's problems were passages like: “He takes nothing personally. He means nothing personal. He is never accusatory or belittling.”

These types of unattributed characterizations are not uncommon in feature writing. But many readers thought Hesse was offering her opinion of who Brown is, as opposed to portraying how he comes across.

Finally, the headline: “Opposing Gay Unions With Sanity & a Smile.” To many readers, The Post was saying Brown's views are sane. The headline, written by editors, not Hesse, should have been neutral.

Apparently that lesson didn't take.

Today's Washington Post Style section features a profile of another anti-gay activist, Bishop Harry Jackson.

For 2,200 words, Post writer Wil Haygood tells readers about Jackson's faith, and about his childhood. Haygood tells us Jackson “found himself” in the Bible after his “Daddy died.” We learn that during his working-class childhood, his parents scraped together money for tuition for private-school, where Jackson was, as he puts it, “the black kid at Country Day who stayed in the houses of wealthy white people.” We learn that he got into Harvard Business school, and was “smitten” when he ran into a childhood acquaintance, who he later married.

And we learn that Jackson's critics are dangerous, angry people:

His admirers have multiplied, and so have his critics. More than once, police have stopped by his Southeast Washington apartment to check on his safety.

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“I was in line someplace recently,” Jackson says, “and a woman who obviously opposes what I'm doing looked at me and said, 'You better go back to Maryland.'”

His wife says: “We have been verbally abused by the best.”

Some of his appearances unleashed vitriol, even threats.

But we never really hear from Jackson's critics. Not in any meaningful way. One is quoted saying Jackson is on TV a lot and is “fighting for political ideas in the religious arena.” Another is quoted saying “It's an unfortunate reality ... that one can't preach discrimination without inciting homophobia.”

And that's it.

Haygood reports that Jackson has won favorable reception for his writing about black families, but makes no mention of Jackson's claims that black people are more prone to “physical intimacy with a nonspouse or enjoyment of pornographic materials” than white people.

Haygood doesn't mention Jackson's claim that God told him to work for George W. Bush's re-election. Or that Jackson has been, as People for The American Way put it, “somewhat of an all-purpose activist and pundit for right-wing causes - everything from judicial nominations to immigration and oil drilling.”

And the Post mentions nothing of Jackson's association with far-right gay-bashers:

While Jackson personally avoids venomous language, he has allied himself with some of the hardest line anti-gay activists on the white Christian Right. One of them is Ohio-based Rod Parsley, the evangelical mega-church preacher whose book, Silent No More, sells three for $10 in the front lobby of Hope Christian's 3,000-member church. A chapter entitled “The Unhappy Gay Agenda” argues that gay people are much given to depression and deviance, including their “substantially higher participation in sadomasochism, fisting, bestiality, ingestion of feces, orgies ... obscene phone calls ... shoplifting, and tax cheating.”

“Homosexuality is not just sick,” writes Parsley, “it is sin.”

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Jackson works with Parsley and a number of other Christian fundamentalists through his High Impact Leadership Coalition (HILC), a collection of black and white evangelical mega-church leaders who've banded together to fight same-sex union rights and campaign for conservative candidates. Standing next to Jackson at the HILC's coming-out press conference in February 2005 was the Rev. Lou Sheldon, head of the Traditional Values Coalition, an anti-gay organization so hard-line that it is listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.

And the Post couldn't find space among those 2,200 words to mention Jackson's opposition to the Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation -- or the disturbing language Jackson used in opposing the bill:

“God's getting ready to shake us up,” roared the Harvard MBA-turned preacher, rousing the audience to divinely ordained political action. With the crowd cheering, applauding, and speaking in tongues, Jackson shouted, “God's looking for a SWAT team ... he's looking for a team of Holy Ghost terrorists!”

Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander may as well just take the rest of the week off, and re-run his September 6 column about Monica Hesse's profile of Brian Brown. Apparently there are some people at the paper's Style section who missed it the first time.

UPDATE: Just to bring things full-circle: Guess who Hesse quoted saying Brown and NOM are “not gay bashers”? Yep: Harry Jackson.