Undercover Gay Reporters Are Making Homophobes Angry

Shh. You hear that? Lurking behind you, packing a pen and a spiral notebook. No, it's not a member of Barack Obama's death panels coming to check to see if you're still alive. It's even worse! It's someone who is driving certain members of the homophobic elite, like D.C's Jonetta Rose Barras, quite mad. It's...it's...it's...

An undercover gay reporter!

See, Barras has a theory as to why D.C. passed gay marriage last week. It has nothing to do with the fact that most of the politicians in the city believe in equal rights and respect for LGBT people. Nor does it have anything to do with the tireless work that advocates for gay marriage poured into the effort to get the City Council to pass the bill. Nope, it had to do with the proliferation of closeted gay reporters writing about marriage equality in a favorable light.

Sounds convoluted, but nobody ever said that homophobes and the right-wing were bad at concocting conspiracy theories. And this one sure sounds like a doozy.

Barras writes on her public relations log that "undercover gay reporters" (her words, not ours) acted disgracefully in reporting on D.C.'s marriage equality bill. She says that closeted gays wrote glowing stories about same-sex marriage without disclosing that they watch Ellen DeGeneres and listen to Rufus Wainwright. The horror!

"Opponents believe they have received the raw deal in the media because the deck was stacked against them. Several of the individuals who reported on the legislation are themselves gay. None revealed their status in the gay community, which surely created...a bias," Barras writes, before unleashing the cat claws. "Standard practice in journalism is for reporters to publicly announce, whether in print, on the radio, on television, on the Internet, when there is a conflict of interest. But not one of the reporters made such an announcement. And that is a disgrace."

Actually, if Barras wants to see disgrace, perhaps she should just stand in front of a mirror. Because if she's trying to talk truth, she's unfortunately way out of her league.

Here's a couple facts about how the D.C. media reported issues around same-sex marriage. First you have an unbelievably glowing Washington Post profile of extremely anti-gay religious leader, Bishop Harry Jackson. Bishop Jackson, who took on the role as the second coming of Jesus for the Post article, was one of the most vocal and aggressive opponents of marriage equality in the District. But yet, he scored a major profile in the city's biggest paper.

And then there's the Wash Post profile of Brian Brown, one of the key staff people with the National Organization for Marriage. Maybe Ms. Barras forgot to read this one. Because what's most interesting about this story isn't the fact that the Post profiled Brown as if he just saved humanity from the plague, but the fact that the woman who wrote the story, Monica Hesse, is bisexual! She openly declared her sexual orientation, after being lambasted by LGBT rights advocates for penning such beautiful prose about Brown.

That's only part of the issue. Sure, Barras champions herself as a communications consultant, when it's clear that she's really not all that familiar with some of the major communications happening in her hometown. But as the American Prospect notes, the very premise that Barras is suggesting -- that a reporter's individual identity could cause a "conflict of interest" -- is pretty much bunk.

"When her assertion is taken to its logical conclusion, black reporters should disclose their race when writing about black issues, Jewish reporters about issues involving Jews, and so on and so forth," writes Adam Serwer for the Prospect. "Barras is essentially arguing that the immutable circumstances of an individual's birth are, by definition, conflicts of interest -- except she only wants to apply that standard to the LGBT community. This is, presumably, the kind of argument Barras considers 'non-discriminatory.'"

Ouch. Ya' burned, Barras.

Here's the deal. It's not undercover or closeted reporters that hurt the anti-gay marriage side. It's the fact that they couldn't convince city legislators that their position wasn't bigoted, discriminatory, and rooted in the type of prejudice that has divided us for far too long. You can blame closeted reporters 'til the cows come home.

(Photo courtesy of sskennel's photostream on Flickr.)