Stop the press: with a landslide of pro-gay news, Dallas's daily newspaper is asking, "How much is too much?".

The Dallas Morning News is the very model of an evolving gay-friendly newspaper. It covers gay issues with balance and sensitivity, and it has scores of openly gay employees to whom its parent company provides domestic-partner benefits. This year it became one of only a handful of dailies in the South to accept announcements of same-sex commitment ceremonies.

That's why it came as a shock to many media observers when the paper's publisher, Jim Moroney, ordered all 500,000 copies of the August 2 religion section destroyed, a highly unusual practice. Moroney was reacting to the prominent placement of a feature article headlined "Episcopalians Latest to Tackle Gay Rights."

"I see it as a case of a publisher who interferes in editorial decision-making," says Kris Martin, public relations manager for the Cathedral of Hope, a gay-friendly church in Dallas. "Mr. Moroney took a knee-jerk reaction to a small but extremely conservative group of people who thought they could influence coverage at the News. It certainly does not fit with the publisher's history, which is to treat the paper not as a vehicle for liberalism but for inclusion."

First reported in the weekly Dallas Observer, the Morning News episode underscores the antigay pressure with which many media outlets must still grapple. Moroney's decision to down-play the story of the election of the Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop came as the paper was reeling from a campaign protesting its decision to accept same-sex union announcements, resulting, the Observer said, in 800 subscription cancellations.

The Morning News had already been struggling to keep up with one of the largest onslaughts of gay news in close to a decade. In a two-month period highlighted by the Supreme Court's opinion striking down the Texas sodomy law, the paper devoted hundreds of column inches to gay issues, including an editorial supporting Wal-Mart's ban on sexual orientation-based discrimination.

In an interview with The Advocate, Moroney attributed his decision to poor communication between the publisher's office and top editors. He said he had asked editors to be extra careful with their gay-related coverage following the decision to run commitment announcements. "I worried it could look like an agenda, look like we were jumping on a bandwagon," he says. "Readers would have heightened sensitivity to the issue. All I was saying was that we shouldn't underplay and overplay the issue and let's communicate about it."

But two weeks later, when the Episcopal story was slated to run on the front of the religion section, Moroney hit the roof. "The bishop story had already been printed before it reached me, and it was five columns with full-color graphics blazing across the front of the section," he says. "There had been no communication about this, and my top editors were on vacation. It was a great story that needed to run, but it seemed to be out of line with covering the issue proportionally, and I made the decision to redesign the page." Moroney estimates that reprinting the section cost the company $25,000.

The Morning News is not alone in searching for a balance between the demands of gay residents and religious conservatives, says Geneva Overholser, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. "Gays in America, and indeed around the world, are making enormous strides," says Overholser, who has also been editor of The Des Moines Register and chair of the Pulitzer Prize board. "Whenever a human rights movement makes progress, and I do see it as progress, you see very real pain on the other side. Change is hard, and editors and publishers do need to be sensitive."

Moroney says he couldn't agree more. "After the policy change, I spoke to a lot of people who objected," he says. "Virtually all of them said we were providing legitimacy to a form of relationship that is neither legally nor biblically sanctioned.... I tried to explain that we have a very large readership that is made up of many overlapping communities. One of them is the gay community in Dallas, and that we had a responsibility to cover it too."

About a week and a half after his decision to reprint the religion section, Moroney gathered his staff to apologize. "There was concern on the staff that my decision would have a chilling effect on what we could or could not cover," he says. "There was a sense that we could no longer cover the gay community as vigorously. That was the worst thing that could happen, and I told them I'd made a mistake. If I had to do it all over again, I would have let the story stand."