Some media outlets aren’t interesting in wishing you a Merry Christmas. They use the occasion to suggest the Christmas story is bunk. But taxpayer-funded NPR will eagerly promote a pagan "High Priestex" in Kansas performing rituals at the Winter Solstice.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published a column over the weekend titled “A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t.”

On Twitter, Alan Cornett, a former assistant to author Russell Kirk summed it up: “Imagine the media of record doing this every year for any other faith’s holy days.” Most of us would get specific, and say, imagine the New York Times doing this for Islam. 

Kristof began his interview with Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels: "Your book raises questions about the virgin birth of Jesus, even pointing to ancient evidence that Jesus might have been fathered by a Roman soldier, possibly by rape." This is the kind of expert that is revered in the liberal media and in the Democrat Party, if there’s any difference between the two. Elaine’s publishers at Doubleday boast, “In 2015 she received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.” The book has blurbs from MSNBC pundits Jon Meacham and Eddie Glaude. 

Pagels told Kristol  “these stories circulated after Jesus’ death among members of the Jewish community who regarded him as a false messiah, saying that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier. I used to dismiss such stories as ancient slander. Yet while we do not know what happened, there are too many points of circumstantial evidence to simply ignore them.”

By contrast, at winter-solstice time, NPR celebrates the growth of paganism and witches. In a four-minute story on All Things Considered, Kansas-based reporter Rose Conlon considered only the pagans, with no critics. The expert was Harvard Divinity School scholar Helen Berger, who "studies pagan communities" and said the trend among young people was tilting against that annoying foe they call "organized religion."

Conlon promoted pagan groups in Wisconsin and then in Kansas, where High Priestex Orin Hart is preparing the annual Yule ritual. This high priestex requires the use of they/them pronouns. This is a group of eight people. Is it too tiny for "news" networks to notice? NPR loathes the megachurch, but adores the mini-coven.

This story called to mind a December 19, 1995 All Things Considered commentary by leftist professor Andrei Codrescu, who described a fundamentalist pamphlet he was handed that said anyone left after the "Rapture" of Christians should just kill themselves. Codrescu proclaimed "the Rapture is indeed necessary. The evaporation of four million who believe this crap would leave the world an instantly better place.”

NPR received 40,000 letters about this commentary. Three days after the commentary, NPR apologized (despite Codrescu’s lack of remorse), but refused then-Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed’s request for a rebuttal. “We turned them down because we felt it was a mistake in the first place,” said NPR flack Kathy Scott. “We weren’t stating a position. You can’t put a counterpoint to a mistake.”

The mistake is a taxpayer-funded network that has nothing but contempt for Christian conservatives. Enjoy the podcast below or wherever you listen to podcasts.