Just What Is Gay Bashing?

I discovered and visited Think Progress this morning http://thinkprogress.org/ and found this report in the media section. On Fox News Sunday, Newt Gingrich excused the House leadership for covering up Mark Foley’s emailing behavior by saying:

a) the families wanted to keep it quiet (people involved in a crime – victims as well as perpectrators – often want to keep it quiet)

b) it wasn’t so bad (minimizing the crime has been working pretty well for Bush and his hawks so let’s just keep going with that), and

c) if they had handled it aggressively, they would have been accused of gay bashing.

A flagrant example of a common and very wrong conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia. It’s late and I’m not going to get into the battling research statistics. Mark Foley may be gay but calling him on the carpet for inappropriate behavior with young people in a professional context is not gay bashing.

Maybe the times are changing: now that Republicans have decided to stop gay bashing, perhaps we’ll see progress on civil rights for all citizens.