Big thanks to Media Matters for America for doing the research on something I was going to blog yesterday, but didn’t have time to research. In its latest column, entitled “Calling the Kettle Gay”, it writes:

Ann Coulter: Calling the kettle gay: In addition to an attack on a website reporter for supposedly operating a gay escort service and thereby cutting into the business of the Village Voice, another Times op-ed article the same day gratuitously outed the children of prominent conservatives.

It doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of some of those words. Let me help:

attack: to engage in battle for purposes of achieving an objective. Hmm, how does noticing someone’s internet profile of their public business activities count as an “attack”?

website reporter: for one to be a website reporter, the website should have to exist before the reporter. Jeff Gannon covered his first White House press conference a month before Talon News existed. “Reporter” is also suspect, as reporters generally are classified as those who write first-hand accounts of news events, while Gannon was plagiarizing other people’s reports and Republican press releases.

supposedly: like allegedly, used to denote something one claims to have happened, but cannot prove directly at the time. When your picture is on the world wide web advertising your escort services for $200/hour, there’s nothing “supposed” about that. As I’ve noted before, you don’t actually have to take the money and do the nasty to be a whore; solicitation of that service is enough for a conviction.

But those are just the warm-up lies. The whopper is when it says the Times “gratuitously outed” conservative’s kids. Again, more definitions so it can begin to understand.

gratuitously: offering or providing something for shock value, rather than to advance an idea or cause. The cause here is to show the rank hypocrisy of anti-gay politicians whose own family members are gay. Nothing gratuitous about it, just like mentioning some supposed female columnists with bleached hair, bony frames, low voices, and pronounced Adam’s apples should be careful when throwing stones at the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgendered community.

outed: Outing is (how many times do I have to explain this to conservatives?) when a gay person wishes to keep their sexual preference secret but then someone else reveals that secret against their wishes. Pointing out that someone is gay when that person publicly acknowledges it is not outing! As Media Matters points out:

[The Times’] op-ed identified three prominent conservatives with homosexual family members: former Illinois Republican Senate candidate Alan Keyes, whose daughter Maya is a lesbian; former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, whose half-sister Candace is a lesbian; and Christian activist Randall Terry, whose adopted son Jamiel is gay. All three had publicly revealed their homosexuality long before Savage’s column appeared.

So the Times noticed that these three anti-gay conservatives had gay family members. This fact may have gone unnoticed by many conservatives, so when it is brought to consevatives’ attention, Coulter calls it “outing”.

Bonus lie for the week (you know it couldn’t restrict itself to just one lie in a column…)

Meanwhile, William J. Murray, the son of prominent atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair — and the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that banned school prayer — came out as a Christian in 1980. There are only two mentions of it in the Lexis-Nexis archives: Facts on File and the Washington Post.

Poor Ann just doesn’t know how to do a Lexis-Nexis search, I guess. According to Media Matters:

Coulter did not provide the details of the scope of her search, but a Nexis search by Media Matters for America of all New York Times articles published between January 1 and December 31, 1980, for “William J. Murray” produced an abstract of a May 10, 1980, article that reported: “William J Murray, son of atheist activist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, apologizes for his part in building what he calls ‘the personal empire of Madalyn O’Hair’. Issues apology through letter to editor of Austin American-Statesman. Says in letter that he wasted 33 years of his life without faith and without God.” The same search also produced a complete Times article from July 31, 1980, titled “Evangelist Calls for Restoration of Prayer in U.S. Public Schools.” It reported:

Among those present in the crowded hearing room was William J. Murray who, as a teenager 17 years ago, was a plaintiff in a suit involved in the Supreme Court’s historic opinion ruling out formal Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the nation’s public schools. Mr. Murray, the son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, one of the nation’s leading atheists, has said he is now a Christian and realizes that the suit brought in Baltimore in 1963 was a mistake.