Gay becomes Homosexual

Having an “auto-replace” filter seemed like a good notion at the time to folks running the OneNewsNow.com website of the conservative American Family Assn. There were certain words that would pop up from time to time in the Associated Press stories that moved onto the site that they considered a bit salacious, or unacceptable to post.

“We don’t have the staff to monitor all the Hollywood stories,” news director Fred Jackson said, “so we wanted an automated function.” He said they put up the filter about a month or so ago.

One word they wanted to filter was “gay.” The site felt that the term put homosexuality “in a positive light,” Jackson said, whereas the evangelical Christian organization was much opposed. So when a wire story referred to gay marriage, for example, the phrase would automatically appear as “homosexual marriage.”

Worked fine until a couple of weeks ago, when an AP report on the site read “Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials.” The story was headlined “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”

“On Saturday,” the story said, “Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat . . . “

That’s world champion sprinter Tyson Gay, of course.

The filtered stories were spotted by the liberal group People for the American Way. The organization has a “Right Wing Watch Blog,” communications director Peter Montgomery said, and folks “who monitor religious-right websites as part of watchdogging the religious right and its political allies.”

The organization took a screen capture of the web page, he said, just before OneNewsNow fixed the text. An earlier story on the website referred to NBA basketball player Rudy Homosexual, better known as Rudy Gay.

Apparently there were no references in the last month to writer Homosexual Talese or to the Enola Homosexual.

As with all good pieces of software, Jackson said, there are drawbacks. It was “a lesson for us to learn,” he said. Jackson didn’t know what other words were targeted, but “we have taken [gay] off the filter.”

So at Christmas you can don that gay apparel.