Right wing Republican Stephen Laffey, a candidate for U.S. Senate in Rhode Island, is struggling today to explain why he wrote hateful anti-gay columns back when he was a student at Bowdoin College in Maine, in the 1980s. In one of Laffey’s columns, he wrote: “I have never once seen a happy homosexual. This is not to say there aren’t any; I simply haven’t seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet. All the homosexuals I’ve seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life.”
Explaining his writings, Laffey said this weekend, “We were just having fun. We thought it was funny.”
Funny. Hmm. You know, I’d buy that, except I just don’t see any joke. Not even a bad joke. Not even a cruel joke. It’s just a hateful, bigoted comment. Where’s the humor in that?
Please, I’d like one of Stephen Laffey’s supporters to come on here and explain what exactly about the passage above is funny. Come on and tell me where the joke is.
The fact that Stephen Laffey still believes that comments like these are “fun” and “funny” shows that the problem isn’t just in the past. This isn’t matter of College Republican hijinks. It’s about a Republican candidate for high political office who thinks that it’s fun to insult people.
Stephen Laffey still has the obsession with hateful cruelty that he had back when he was in college. Maybe that attitude makes him a popular candidate with Republican voters, but it makes him unfit to be a United States Senator.
