Interests:

The San Francisco Chronicle has decided that two women who got married can no longer cover “the same-sex-marriage story.” I saw this via Tim Graham at the Corner, who headlines the post “lesbian media ethics and rolls his eyes about ‘liberal hand-wringing’ but doesn’t indicate whether he thinks there’s a genuine conflict of interest here or not.

I don’t. I get the Chronicle’s intuition, of course: the reporters now have a personal stake in whether the SF marriages are eventually upheld as legal. But one doesn’t prohibit all married reporters from reporting on every legal fight over the meaning, benefits, and incidents of marriage. Married reporters cover the debate over the marriage penalty, arguments about divorce law, and so on. Having a stake in the legal consequences of one’s marriage hasn’t ever been a disqualification from reporting on marriage. Moreover, the reporters also would have had a stake in the outcome of the story had they not gotten married but simply intended to once the legal situation was resolved.

Reporters with children aren’t disqualified from reporting on whether Congress will increase the dependent child exemption. People with incomes aren’t disqualified from reporting on changes in the income tax code. Homeowners aren’t disqualified from reporting on real estate markets.

If the reporters were parties to any of the lawsuits surrounding same-sex marriage, then I suppose exclusion would have to follow. But if they’re just in the class of persons who will be affected by the outcome of the lawsuits, I can’t make out what the rule would be that could lead to disqualification. Disputes about basic legal rules and widespread social institutions affect too many people for them to be the basis of conflict-of-interest disqualifications.

Since Stanley Kurtz is always telling us that everyone’s marriage will be affected by the onset of gay marriage, I look forward to his public statement that either these reporters should not be disqualified or everyone should be.