Saturday, 16 October 2004

Pete Coors and Homer Simpson on homosexuality

Jason Kuznicki comments on a strange exchange between Pete Coors and Tim Russert:

Russert: "You see no inconsistency between sponsoring male nude revues and fetish balls and opposing gay adoption and gay marriage?"

Coors: “I don’t.”

Russert: “None whatsoever?”

Coors: “No.”

Russert: “And you’re comfortable sponsoring those kinds of events? That’s part of traditional family values?”

Coors: “Look, this is a very—you know, people are going to have a lot of different ideas about what this is all about. But it is about recognizing that everybody—everyone in this country—should be valued for what they are, and I believe that’s the way we recognize it at our company.”

Kuznicki writes:

When Coors Brewing, an organization with a long and very poor record on gay issues, suddenly sponsors a raunch fetish party, they are valuing us for who we are. But when we ourselves demand to be treated as ordinary people--That's an attack on the traditional family.

In a sense, it’s the hidden curse of diversity. For years, we insisted on the essential difference between gay and straight. We demanded that gays must be accepted as different.

Then some people apparently got the message: Gays are acceptable only if they are these strange, hypersexualized, fundamentally sub-human creatures. We can dance nude on stage or wet ourselves in public—but when we try to get married or raise a family, man, that’s sick.

The attitude of Pete Coors towards gays reminds me of Homer Simpson: “I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexuals flaming.”