Goodman: "Hypocrisy aside, morality programs not working"

Here is the second Goodman column in a row (the last was on April 25) that the Courier has run full-length and largely unmolested. It originally ran as "Hoisted on His Own Pizza" on May 3.

The following will be real inside baseball, so if your eyes glaze over feel free to move on. I'd like to highlight a few of the specific changes to the text, to illustrate what I mean by arbitrary edits and introduced errors.

Goodman: "A for abstinence, B for be faithful, and C for condoms only if you belong to a high-risk group that flunks A and B."
Courier: "A for abstinence, B for be faithful, and C for condoms if you belong to a high-risk group that flunks A and B."

Here it appears that the copy editor wanted to tighten the paragraph a bit to eliminate what we used to call a tail-break in my shop, half a word on a line by itself. This also helps fit the copy into the available space. The way to do this is to substitute a shorter word or eliminate one. The editor's blue pencil chose 'only,' a nice, short word. But it also removed an important nuance from Goodman's sentence. The editor could have eliminated 'George' a little earlier in the graph without harm. In context the specific choice seems to be an attempt to 'correct' Goodman's thinking.

Goodman: "Joining a dishonor role that includes anti-child predator predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard ..."
Courier:"Joining a dishonor role that includes anti-child predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard ..."

In this example we may have a similar tail-break situation, and again the editor could have elided "Randall" farther down for no foul. Instead s/he arbitrarily deflated Goodman's perhaps too-cute but nonetheless intelligible parallel construction in favor of gibberish. Perhaps s/he didn't understand the sentence.

Goodman: "The $1.5 billion that has been thrown into teaching abstinence-until-marriage has made no difference in delaying the onset of sex."
Courier: "The $1.5 billion Bush has thrown into teaching abstinence-until-marriage has made no difference in delaying the onset of sex."

The bosses have decreed that no passive construction shall be left unmolested, and the copy editor dutifully applied the blue pencil. But an active construction requires a subject, so s/he had to invent one, in this case "Bush." Perhaps Ms Goodman reserves her displeasure exclusively for the Current Resident on this score, but she didn't write it that way, and the change injects a nuance that she expressly avoided.

Goodman: "... abstinence-only earmarks on AIDS prevention funding are undermining success."
Courier:"... abstinence-only earmarks on AIDS prevention money are undermining success.

I have no clue why the copy editor made this change.