As congregations throughout the United Methodist Church, the second largest protestant denomination in terms of membership in the U.S., are roiling to one degree or another over the issue of same-sex relationships, the Washington Post last week published a long article on the coping of exiled congregations in churches that have actually voted out of the denomination over the issue.

Needless to say, it is a contentious issue even while an awful lot has changed in the last 20 years on the matter. The latest big development has been Pope Francis of the Catholic Church asserting the church’s embrace of gay people, something that was considered unheard of only a few years ago but generally in keeping with the exemplary posture of this unique pope, even as he copes with the uncomfortable infirmities of age.

Civilization does not advance at an even pace, and the division within the United Methodist Church is characteristic of that. Opponents of a positive embrace by the church of LGBTQ+ people are convinced society and the church are on a slippery slope toward abandonment of what they consider core values of faith. On the other hand, open acceptance of LGBTQ+ people is grounded in an evolving appreciation of the role of democratic institutions in our society and the wounds that eons of severe discrimination have inflicted on certain innocent individuals.

This writer, in his function as owner-editor of a weekly community newspaper in the small Northern Virginia community known as Falls Church, was in the middle of such a contentious church schism that consumed the better part of our new century in its first decades. The fight is over for now after years of court fights and bruised feelings, and the more progressive current has prevailed.

I am happy to report that my newspaper, and my editorials, played a major role in that outcome, and it is a living illustration of just one of the ways a responsible, independent newspaper can have a huge impact that goes beyond just functioning as an indifferent scribe reporting on events.

In the course of a seeming taking of sides in a heated debate like that one, a good newspaper, I believe, has a responsibility to not treat all views as equal, but to divine the underlying issues in any given debate and to stand on the side simply of the most core of all values in a democracy as embodied in the dictum of the Constitutional notion of the equality of all persons.

This is entirely consistent with the role of a responsible newspaper in a free society. Certainly there are newspapers and organizations that have no intention of striving for such a posture, as they clearly represent partisan interests whether openly or secretly, and the law cannot require anything different from them.

But a true representation of a free press in a democratic society can be found in those entities which do follow such a narrow path. “Objectivity” in the usual sense neither is nor ought to be the main the goal of such an organization, but facts that arise from a context defined by the assumption of equality, and their fair reporting.

“Assuming equality is the standard” could be the way coverage of any event or comments might begin, and in fact the posture of any good news organization should be seen as applying that standard.

Had that standard been applied to coverage of the campaign for the presidency of Donald Trump, for example, especially in its first year, the outcome most certainly would have been markedly different. His campaign was covered in a so-called value-free way, and that became an unmitigated disaster.

I find that core flaw exhibited throughout the memoir, “Collision of Power,” of former Washington Post managing editor Marty Baron, for example, in the paper’s coverage of the Steele Dossier, for example. The challenge was not to pick away at the veracity of the minutiae but to operate in a scientific manner from an hypothesis concerning the broader issue of whether or not Trump and his associates were acting as Russian agents, and then to test that hypothesis in the material and in its application to events.