Garrison Keillor's bad example

Last week I covered Garrison Keillor's moronic column about the good old days when families stayed nice and nuclear and gay men pretty much weren't found anywhere outside of hair salons and antique stores. And they definitely weren't trying to get married or have kids. Turns out those of us that took offense at Keillor's were just missing the joke.

Yeah, that's right, Garrison wasn't really serious when he said:

And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.

The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.

It was all tongue-in cheek, you see. Dan Savage over at the SLOG has Garrison's whole "I'm sorry if you're feelings got hurt" apology. Nice example Keillor's setting for Maia, his daughter by his third wife (that's a little something Keillor forgot to mention in his column). Dan does a great job of blowing apart how lame Keillor's Bush-ian apology is, but what got me were the comments posted by Dan's readers. A shocking number of them tell Dan to just get over it and it's not that big of a deal anyway, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Frankly, it reminds me of the reaction to our coverage of 300 which we were apparently too dumb to just understand is only a movie and who cares if the villain is a giant queen coming to get the straight boys? Don't we know most folks are really tolerant of gay folks today? Just like with 300, folks think Dan is being a nag and not focusing his attention those really hurting gays and lesbians.

Poppycock. Dan Savage has done as much to combat homophobia as almost anyone else out there. He's earned the right to criticize pretty much whomever he wants and if he thinks something is worth criticizing, you can pretty much bet he's right. And he's completely on target to call Keillor out for his bigoted comments. As for those who think 300 and Keillor's homophobia don't matter or aren't enough to worry about, the only reason society has changed as drastically as it has is because of people like Dan being willing to step forward and speak up. And not just in comments.

Thanks to Wayman for the head's up on the apology!