Chron's marriage problem

RACHEL GORDON, a San Francisco Chronicle city hall reporter, and Liz Mangelsdorf, a Chron photographer, did something a few weeks ago that straight people all over the world do every hour of every day without having to worry about the consequences for their careers. They got married.

For the Chron's editor, Phil Bronstein, this simple act threatened the paper's supposed objectivity: Bronstein announced Gordon and Mangelsdorf could no longer cover the gay-marriage issue – which was, and is, the hottest story in their beats. His memo, which is posted on Grade the News (www.stanford.edu/group/gradethenews), goes through a tortured analysis to reach that conclusion, but what it boils down to is this: Bronstein decided it was inherently a political act for Gordon and Mangelsdorf to get married, and it placed them in the middle of a major controversy they could no longer cover.

But that's just wrong. There are plenty of people who made political statements out of their same-sex marriages and plenty who have joined political groups or campaigns pushing the issue. Gordon and Mangelsdorf did neither. They got married quietly and issued no statements. They didn't march on City Hall or sign on to a lawsuit. They didn't praise the mayor or denounce the president. They just got married.

It is, of course, ridiculous that two lesbian journalists would even have to think about this sort of thing. When same-sex marriage is legal and accepted all over the country, and it soon will be, this will become a nonissue. The Chron (which no sane person would call "objective," anyway) ought to treat Gordon and Mangelsdorf the way it would a straight couple, and recognize their marital status has no impact on their work.

P.S. It's really annoying to see two Hearst Corp. employees subjected to this sort of nonsense when high-level executives and publishers of all the big media companies routinely lobby for and get favors from the government, from joint-operating agreement and antitrust approvals to favorable Federal Communications Commission rulings. What hypocrisy.