Haters gonna hate and I am so sick of it

You may recall an item here some months back where I talked about an anti-gay email I had received and how I wanted to respond to it. My editors chose not to include it because they did want to give a platform to homophobia.

Unfortunately, homophobes are finding plenty of platforms and the megaphones to shout from them. The ad above was taken off Hallmark Channel when viewers complained about seeing a same-sex couple in the ad, with one anti-gay bunch of bigots threatening a boycott of Hallmark over the ad.

Because, to them, LGBT people -- including those who are loving, who marry, who raise children -- cannot be family-friendly. What crap. (Hallmark has now reversed its decision.)

But not the only crap. In my Q-and-A column, I recently included an item about Shepard Smith leaving Fox News. And in the email came a note about Smith that was so nasty and vulgar about Smith and his private life that I can't bring myself to quote it here. (This week, another letter along the same lines arrived.)

There is too much fear, too much hatred, of our LGBT friends and family in the American community. There is too much misunderstanding of people, including some of my students, whose idea of love and gender is different from the bigoted -- those who are so eager to narrow the definitions of morality, family and other words until they only apply to folks exactly like themselves.

And this is just a part of a vaster intolerance fueled by people from the White House on down in our society. It comes from the same kind of thinking that apparently prompted military-academy cadets to flash white-power signals at the Army-Navy game today. A game, by the way, that the Bigot In Chief was attending.