Yesterday during News and Sports, Steve talked about the ironic thing Dan Savage is being called and why.
For those who don’t know, Dan Savage is an openly gay man who is big on anti-bullying and writes a sex advice column in the Seattle newspaper “The Stranger.”
While giving a speech to a group of high school journalists, he started focusing on the “hypocrisy” of Christians who wouldn’t condemn anti-gay bullying because of what the Bible says about homosexuality.
During his rant he said, “We can learn to ignore the bulls— in the Bible about gay people… the same way we have learned to ignore the bulls— in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bulls— in the Bible about all sorts of things.”
At that point, about 20 or 30 students and advisors quietly stood up and walked out of the auditorium.
That’s when Dan said, “It’s funny, as someone who is the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back,”
Since those comments, Dan has been called a bully, something he supposedly fights against. Dan did apologize via a statement he made on The Stranger’s website. Here is what he said:
I would like to apologize for describing that walk out as a pansy-assed move. I wasn’t calling the handful of students who left pansies (2800+ students, most of them Christian, stayed and listened), just the walk-out itself. But that’s a distinction without a difference — kinda like when religious conservatives tells their gay friends that they ‘love the sinner, hate the sin. They’re often shocked when their gay friends get upset because, hey, they were making a distinction between the person (lovable!) and the person’s actions (not so much!). But gay people feel insulted by ‘love the sinner, hate the sin’ because it is insulting. Likewise, my use of ‘pansy-assed’ was insulting, it was name-calling, and it was wrong. And I apologize for saying it.
Dan is an intelligent man who, just like everyone else, got a little upset and said things he regretted. I don’t have a problem with that; what I have a problem with is that he wasn’t accountable for his mistakes.
I lost a lot of respect for Dan. He should have just come out just apologized and that’s it.
He said he wasn’t calling the students “pansy assed” but the walk-out itself, “pansy assed” but isn’t that the same thing? Claiming you did what Christians do, doesn’t change the fact that you inferred that they were “pansy assed.”
I am so sick of people making excuses, blaming other people, and just not being accountable for their own actions. We are humans, we make mistakes, we lose our tempers, so it’s ok to just apologize for the things we’ve done wrong. Adding an excuse just negates the apology…and Dan, that is bull—.
