Recently I was given a copy of Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer. It's a swift read that exposes many accounts of liberal arrogance. In one chapter Schweizer looks at left-wing talk show host (and former Saturday Night Live head writer) Al Franken, who in the past didn't shy away from expressing his contempt toward gays.
Schweizer notes that Franken, while attending Harvard, had a
skit rejected by that school's famed Hasting Pudding Club. Later,
while writing for SNL in 1976, Franken was
interviewed by the Harvard Crimson, which related the
following:
He recalled writing a skit called "Seamen on Broadway" that was rejected from the Hasty Pudding show "by some preppie so they could take some other preppie's skit." Franken started to smile again, but his tone was serious, too serious. "It's not preppies, cause I'm a preppie myself. I just don't like homosexuals. If you ask me, they're all homosexuals in the Pudding. Hey, I was glad when that Pudding homosexual got killed in Philadelphia." The smile became so broad it pushed his eyes shut. He couldn't stand it any longer. "Put that in, put that in," Franken laughed, leaning over the desk. "I'd love to see that in The Crimson."
Gay Patriot has already picked up on this. I'll add that it was always pretty clear that Franken's SNL Stuart Smalley character (based on the real host of a New York City public access show) was brimming with contempt for effeminate gays. Franken has always, it now seems, been a hater.
More: Reader Curtis comments: "I don't know how anyone could read Franken's words and then defend his joking gleefully about a gay-bashing death (or so it certainly seems) as just his being 'ironic.' I was in college in 1976, and the campus leftists were very hostile toward gays. It wasn't until the '80s that gay leftists ingratiated themselves with the larger left, which decided all those gay foot soldiers could be useful."
That rings true to me, too.
And while I'm linking to Gay Patriot, he also has a nice
posting on the foolish politics of gay activists who portray
(literally!) George Bush as Adolf Hitler.