Feel the pain of the far-right religious radio host. Here is the sad tale of a good Christian talk show host (a temporary host, actually, as this Austin Ruse fellow has to get on with his day job of, I s--t you not,
praising Putin's Russia for their crackerjack job of criminalizing Being Gay In Public) who was innocently watching a Food Network program with his child when one of the chefs started to look suspiciously like a "butch lesbian," setting off his Holydar, but he wasn't quick enough. No, the Food Network
was indeed showing A Gay:
So I didn’t have my hand on the trigger fast enough when they did a hard cut to a backstory about this lesbian chef and don’t you know it she’s got her arm around her ‘wife,’ she refers to her ‘wife,’ and I was too slow in fast-forwarding. My eight-year-old Lucy, sweet Lucy, turned to me and said: ‘Did she say wife?’ And I said, ‘No, I think she meant girlfriend.’ And Lucy said, ‘I think she said life.’ God bless the innocence of this child. But they will not let us off the mat, the ideologies who want to cram this thing down our throats no matter where we go.
Luckily, Ruse's quick thinking prevented his daughter from being exposed to the notion that gay people exist, at least for another day. (But if she does not know they exist, how can she properly learn to condemn them? A conundrum.)
Still I know exactly how the guy feels. There have been times when I've been on a long stretch of highway out on the other side of nowhere, scanning the radio for anything worth listening to. Then, bam, all of a sudden there's the booming voice of a gigantic asshole coming out the speakers.
It doesn't matter how quick I am with the radio buttons. I still hear it, at least for a few terrible seconds. That drawling certainty, that puffy arrogance, the nearly incoherent paranoia presenting itself as godly, or patriotic, or more enlightened than thou: The plain fact that a gigantic asshole has been given access to radio broadcasting equipment has been permanently seared into my brain. No matter how long I live, I will forever be aware that assholes get radio shows.
And what of my daughter? I try very, very hard to not expose her to the creepy bigot lifestyle. I don't let her watch Christian television. When another car on the road has an asshole-based bumper sticker, I carefully perform the "PIT" maneuver, spinning the offender into a ditch and giving him a quiet opportunity to rethink his automotive decor choices. But what if she were to hear such a thing on the radio? Would I be quick-thinking enough to come up with a plausible lie as to why the person speaking was not, in fact, an asshole? No matter how much I try, it is never enough; my daughter is slowly but surely being exposed to the idea that, even in this great and glorious nations, there are some spectacular jackasses out there. People who will be forever judging how she dresses, or who she loves, or whether any given doctor of hers might need killing for ideological reasons.
I feel your pain, buddy. If only this were Russia and we could ban those jerks, right?