And the Jayson Blair Award Goes To…

The Associated Press reports tonight that:

The head of a conservative lobbying group accused Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin of making up quotes attributed to him in Wednesday’s column….
The Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said he has ‘‘never met Jimmy Breslin, never had the conversation described in his column today and never said those sentences to anyone in my life.”

There have been whispers in the journalism community before about Breslin’s columns; that they sometimes cross the line from truth to fable.
On the other hand, Shame.org has this to say about the fundamentalist minister:

Founder of “Traditional Values Coalition” said only heterosexual survivors of the Trade Center attack should receive benefits.
The Rev. Louis P. Sheldon, chairman and founder of Traditional Values Coalition, said yesterday that public and private relief agencies providing assistance to the survivors of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks should not give aid to surviving members of gay partnerships.
Groups such as the Red Cross “should be first giving priority to those widows who were at home with their babies and those widowers who lost their wives,” Sheldon said. Assistance “should be given on the basis and priority of one man and one woman in a marital relationship.”

This is at least as loopy as what Breslin attributes to Reverend Sheldon. But if we’re not going to give Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass a pass for fabricating news, and we shouldn’t, then we have to hold Breslin to the same standards, regardless of his status as a journalism institution.
It’s hard to know the truth, however. Sheldon allegedly made the remarks attributed to him in 1992: since then acceptance of gay and lesbian lifestyles has grown tremendously (1992 was before the wildly popular “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”). Even a benighted fossil like Sheldon might recognize that his remarks now expose him to ridicule.