However Sincerely Said, It’s Still Bigotry : Andy Rooney: With his kind face and saddened eyes, the CBS commentator has given the imprimatur of his respectability to anti-gay feelings.

“All’s well that ends well,” said commentator Mike Wallace in attempting with a smile to sum up the Andy Rooney affair that began when Rooney claimed on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that “many of the ills which kill us are self-induced: too much alcohol, too much food, drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes.” That and alleged remarks about blacks having “watered-down genes” led to a three-month suspension. After only three weeks, Rooney was reinstated Sunday.

With saddened eyes, Rooney denied there were racist implications and declared that he did not want to be perceived “as someone who had made life a little more difficult for homosexuals. I feel terrible about that. . . . How do I apologize to homosexuals for hurting them with a remark. . . . I didn’t realize would hurt them?” He let his original statement stand. It is pertinent, then, to ask: Did all really end well?

Bigotry is never more damaging than when it assumes the modulated voice of reason and sincerity. Rooney employed that voice to convey his true views about homosexuality in a letter written to homosexuals and printed in its entirety only by the gay periodical The Advocate. That letter begins:

“I’m sorry I offended so many homosexual people and would not be writing this if I were not sensitive to their complaints.” He reveals immediately the extent of his “sensitivity.” Although he admits there is “very little definite medical or scientific evidence to go on” and that “the American Psychiatric Assn. has removed the diagnosis of homosexuality from its official list of mental illnesses,” he asserts that it “seems” to him that homosexuality is a “behavioral aberration.” Given the strong evidence he cites against that belief, on what basis other than prejudice may he arrive at his conclusion? “Is this evil of me?” he asks.

How can such a deeply questioning voice be “evil”? After all, doesn’t his letter praise homosexuals as “remarkably talented”? In his thinking, homosexuality may produce fine art yet it is also, in his view, fatal. He finds “spurious” the argument that it is “the AIDS virus, not homosexuality, that kills.” He compares that to saying that criminals, not guns, kill.

He ignores the matter of intent--the choice to kill with a gun. Certainly he doesn’t believe gay men choose to kill each other? It was years before anything was known about AIDS. Now safe-sex practices are helping to keep it in check.

Does Rooney find a certain “homosexual” act “repugnant . . . ethically and morally wrong . . . abnormal”? He asks himself that only to volunteer his answer: “It seems so to me. I can’t say why, and if a person can’t say what he thinks, he probably doesn’t have a thought.” What admirable candor. But it allows him to give his non-thought judgmental words, and he ignores the fact that the same act is practiced by heterosexuals.

Does herpes, so prevalent, indict heterosexuality? Did syphilis when it was such a scourge that the Army held warning classes and encouraged use of condoms?

In answer to inferences that he might feel that homosexuals with AIDS should die, Rooney asks, sadly: “Do I strike you as someone who would say or think such a terrible thing?”

Indeed not, because he is a kind-faced, respectable man with a mild manner and caring eyes. Yet it is precisely that image and the soft expression of bigotry that make his statements more harmful than the rantings of a Wally George. That respectability has already encouraged many decent people to question the fairness of calling Rooney a bigot for expressing his doubts, sincerely, about the “rightness” of homosexuality. Well, then, are white supremacists not bigots when they express their belief, stupidly but sincerely, that blacks are intellectually inferior? Were the Nazis not bigots when they claimed, ignorantly but sincerely, that Jews were genetically inferior?

Rooney has given the imprimatur of his respectability to anti-gay feelings, just as the Supreme Court did by ruling that the Constitution does not protect private consensual homosexual relations; just as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League did when it refused to include homosexuality in its school-instruction program for tolerance, forgetting that tens of thousands of homosexuals also died in Nazi concentration camps.

Filtering down into the front lines of prejudice, the words of benign bigotry that Rooney spoke with whispers of concern will be translated, fairly or not, into dangerous ones. This occurs at a time when there are attacks almost daily by gay-bashers newly emboldened by respectable prejudice.

In his kind letter, Rooney writes: “I think of gay men as victims.” Victims of our own sexual orientation as he implies? No. Victims of bigotry? Yes--and to that, Rooney has added.