Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:05 pm
Tuesday saw CNN’s Anderson Cooper put gay-hating Florida attorney general Pam Bondi to the metaphorical screws and wring out of her a confession of her long history of anti-gay activism.
We are likely offended by her claim that though she persecutes gays, she has never said she doesn’t like gays. Because she was clearly, as The Young Turks‘ Ben Mankiewicz put it Wednesday, “deceitful and dishonest” on the issue. But this is not what upsets conservatives.
Naturally, such journalism – the kind you don’t see on Fox News, where people like Bondi thrive, the kind where hard answers are asked and actual answers are expected – did not sit well with Republicans, because, well…do you really need to have it explained to you?
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Bondi later aired her grievances as being caught out to New York’s WOR 710.
Ironically, now exposed hater Bondi complained that Cooper had tricked her, and that he had encouraged hate rather than help people: According to WOR, “Bondi called Cooper ‘the champion for the LGBT community’ and said he could have been helping people. She said all the interview did was ‘encourage anger and hate.’â€
Super bigot Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, was especially incensed on Bondi’s behalf, because Anderson Cooper is gay, and being gay, like being black or Muslim or Native American, is a red flag for Fischer. Apparently, gay guys should not be allowed to ask questions of heterosexuals who hate gays. Because, insists Fischer, it’s too emotional an issue.
Watch courtesy of Right Wing Watch:
“Anderson Cooper, who is an open, admitted homosexual … therefore ought to recuse himself from any story like this. He has no business trying to do journalism on an issue as fraught with emotion as the homosexual agenda. He’s disqualified from providing any kind of objective journalistic treatment of that topic.”
We can safely imagine that women should not be able to put the metaphorical screws to misogynists either, because women’s rights is such an emotionally charged issue.
Fischer apparently wants us to believe that there is no emotion involved in covering the white heterosexual male Christian agenda (“traditional marriage,†controlling women’s reproductive processes, etc.), even though, from Fischer’s frequent rants over the years, we know there is quite a bit of emotion involved. Need I even mention Donald Trump?
And here again we see surfacing ideas like Donald Trump’s that only white people can be impartial. For Fischer, it’s only heterosexuals. Everyone else – being the ‘other’ – is biased.
The bigger question is if Anderson Cooper is not allowed to cover LGBT-related stories because he is gay, does that not then also disqualify white heterosexual male Christians from covering “white heterosexual male Christian†storylines, like “traditional marriage�
Whether that means Bryan Fischer, David Barton and others who – not to be uncharitable – seem, shall we say, “self-loathing,” must recuse themselves from covering those storylines is best known by Fischer and Barton themselves.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
