The little-known [imaginary] power of quotation marks

I was reminded yesterday of the Washington Times' insane standing policy on the use of the words marriage and marry in articles about same-sex marriage. I think it's hilarious that they put quotation marks in there, as if their editorial decision can somehow magically reach out across hundreds of miles and completely nullify the laws and legal system of a U.S. state.

The other thing I noticed about the story, though, was that it was actually an AP story rather than a Washington Times-authored piece. So this led me to wonder whether the Washington Times simply alters AP stories or if the AP actually puts out a specific gay-unfriendly version of their stories for publications like the Washington Times. The latter would be pretty disturbing. And if the former, then I wonder how the AP feels about the Washington Times fooling around with the punctuation in their stories for the purpose of giving the AP's writing a very specific political slant.

And just for the sake of comparison, I quickly found a few other newspapers' webpage versions of the same AP story:

The Stamford Advocate
The Philadelphia Inquirer
The New York Sun

No quotations to be found anywhere else... no surprise there.