HomoHate - It Must Be Profitable To Be This Common In The Media

Uncle Walter - we miss you dearly.

A few months ago, upon the death of Walter Cronkite, I was struck by how the "traditional media" has changed. There was a time when we tuned into the news, or opened our newspapers, that we could expect to see facts reported to us in context. It made reading the paper an informative activity, something you even encouraged children to do to teach them about the world.

These days, so much of the traditional media is so full of hate and homophobia, I feel like Reverend Lovejoy's wife on The Simpsons wailing out "What about the children? Won't someone think of the children" Because if these people actually cared one bit about “protecting the children" the traditional media would be closed down for being irredeemably offensive.

Need proof of that? Let’s start with newspapers in that most civilized of countries, the U.K.

Stephen Gately, of the boyband Boyzone died last week, and it seemed that Britain, Ireland, and even the U.S.A. stopped for a respectful moment of silence. Then the speculation began. Drugs? Too much alcohol? Was his partner, Andrew Cowles, having sex with a young Bulgarian man in the next room?

This was certainly vile speculation given a young man was dead, but they really weren’t beyond-the-pale when it comes to celebrity death. Heath Ledger’s passing prompted plenty of rude speculation as well.

But then Jan Moir, a columnist for the Daily Mail, chose to use Gately's death as a jumping off point for a homophobic rant. Spewed Moir: 

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

It is important that the truth comes out about the exact circumstances of his strange and lonely death.

As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine.

For once again, under the carapace of glittering, hedonistic celebrity, the ooze of a very different and more dangerous lifestyle has seeped out for all to see.

Free speech is a funny thing – in America, we might be outraged, we might even call for an advertiser boycott, but that would be the end of it. Evidently in the U.K., newspapers have a code of responsibility they can be held in violation of. I’m not going to go into the details of that, because I’m not a lawyer, and I’d get it wrong. But social media sites are enabling fans to put pressure on the government to do something about Moir's hateful words.

The Facebook group has over 3500 members since this morning.

Illusionist Derren Brown took to his Twitter account to urge action, and was even kind enough to provide the sections of the code that Moir broke.

Twitter is showing this subject as the #1 trending topic.

Stephen Fry, being a comedian, took a slightly drier approach to his outrage, noting that at best, the paper was a fringe piece of tabloid.

Being seen with the Daily Mail is like wearing last year's Marc Jacobs.

The Mail knows it has a problem, because earlier stories reported that the original headline has been changed from “Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately’s death” to the ‘friendlier’ “A strange, lonely and troubling death.”

I’m not sure how long it takes for the PCC, which has regulatory authority in Britain, to act, but at this point, their complaint website has reportedly crashed multiple times.

Even South park knows Bill Donohue is crazy.

In the American haters department, we have the head of the Catholic League head Bill Donohoe. He has a new book to shill, so he went on CBN to be interviewed by Pat Robertson, who I’m guessing is the only person that will talk to him these days.

Donohoe’s terribly upset that churches that don’t allow gays to adopt can’t get federal funds (and why is the federal government funding churches in the first place?), and that we’re all a bunch of cultural nihilists. Evidently we’re not Marxists, because we don’t have a replacement blueprint for when we tear down this “Christian Nation.”

Pat Robertson leads Bill down one of the most bizarre rabbit holes I’ve ever heard when it comes to sexual abuse of minors by priests in the Catholic Church. Left leaning liberals have infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to manufacture a pedophilia problem that doesn’t exist.

In other words, they don’t have a pedophilia problem, they have a homosexual problem. .

There’s evidently not enough homosexual shoulders to lay the blame on, because Donohoe decides to rip on Episcopal churches and in something new to me – pro-abortion nuns. Does such a thing exist? In numbers large enough to warrant a national media outing, even if it’s just on a pseudo-news program that ABCFamily is legally obligated to air?

Last week Buju played nice with gays after half his tour got canceled.

Finally, I’ll bring your attention to the Caribbean nation of Jamaica, which is under boycott from many gay brands in the United States for tolerating homophobia that leads to open violence. For weeks, there’s been a campaign to have the shows for murder-music king Buju Banton canceled, since he built a career around the idea of murdering gays.

Last week, he met with San Francisco gay activists led by Michael Petrelis, and seemed conciliatory. Evidently that was just to get his concert in the Bay Area back in a venue. Now that Buju has gotten to perform and line his pockets, he said “No end to the war between me and the gays” when speaking today with The Jamaica Observer.

Even the Jamaican paper seems to think he's an opportunist.

So there were are surrounded on all sides in the media by homophobia that profits large media conglomerates. Are people so scared of the world right now that this still works? And while I’d like to be able to say that we queers are the last group that it’s cool to hate on, I open up my browser and discover a justice of the peace is denying a marriage license to an interracial couple? What. Is. Wrong. With. The. World?

Now excuse me, I need to go scream at my television some more.