It’s been kind of a banner week as far as making offensive and stupid comments about gays goes. In case you missed them, let’s run down the top slurs:
Coming in at No. 3, Pat Buchanan, on why he appears to be suspended from MSNBC: “Look, for a long period of time the hard left, the militant gay rights groups, militant—they call themselves civil rights groups, but I’m not sure they’re concerned about civil rights—people of color, Van Jones, these folks and other have been out to get Pat Buchanan off TV.” That’s right. It’s hard to be Pat Buchanan, what with all those blacks and homos you’re always belittling out to get you. It turns you into the sort of paranoid freak that refers to himself in the third person.
At No. 2, we’ve got ABC president Paul Lee explaining why he doesn’t get concerns that the network’s new superweird series Work It, about two men who cross-dress poorly to get sales jobs, is pretty insensitive to actual transgender issues: “I loved Tootsie.” Oh. Alright then.
For the No. 1 most heartbreaking comment, there’s Troy, Michigan’s mayor Janice Daniels. Last year, she provoked some outrage for writing, “I think I am going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there” on her Facebook page. This year, she’s told students of a high school Gay-Straight Alliance that she would like to invite to a forum on bullying and suicide “a panel of psychologists who would testify that homosexuality is a mental disease.” At least the students claim she said that; Daniels denies it. Though she says she taped the meeting, she refuses to let anyone hear the tapes. Maybe the kids misheard her. That, after all, totally doesn’t sound like something she would say.
