Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Matt Philbin has a notable gay-bashing record: He turns a blind eye to anti-gay slurs, thinks a young boy with brightly painted toenails is "transgendered child propaganda," and he's opposed to gays or anyone who looks like they might be gay from being depicted in advertising.
Philbin takes his hatred and fear of gays to a new, silly level in a March 20 MRC Culture & Media Institute post, headlined "‘Glee’ on the Gridiron?" in which he fearmongers about the unmanly specter of openly gay athletes:
If liberals in the sports media have their way, your favorite sporting event will soon be a little more like an episode of “Glee.” Writers and talking heads at outlets from ESPN to NBC Sports are in a full-court press. They want to see openly gay athletes in American sports, no matter what it means for the games, the fans, or the athletes themselves.
Perhaps envious that their news colleagues get to cover – and advocate for – what a Washington Post reporter recently called “the civil rights issue of our time,” sports journalists have been long been obsessed with gay athletes. Commentator after commentator have taken to ESPN’s website to assure us “the issue of sports and homosexuality isn't going away,” to call a football player “intelligent and articulate athlete when he made a stand for gay rights,” and to wonder where the gay Jackie Robinson is.
Yes, it seems Philbin really thinks that, say, a single football player who makes his homosexuality public means the entire team will break out into show tunes on the field.
Philbin's level of thinking doesn't go far beyond that. He complains about how "CNN’s pro-gay bias is well established" -- actually, that's more about Philbin's fellow MRC employee Matt Hadro studiously documenting every time gays fail to be bashed on CNN -- then asserts that "bias is more like obsession when the network can’t do a sports interview one of the best pitchers in baseball (who lost the World Series in October) without bringing up – apropos of nothing – gay rights. But there was CNN’s Carol Costello asking Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander if he’d have problems playing with an openly gay teammate." But Philbin ignores that 1) the idea of gays in sports had been talked about in the media in previous months, and 2) Costello began the interview with an even more apropos-of-nothing question: Verlander's golf game.
It seems that the only person obsessed with homosexuality here is Philbin.
