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GLAAD calls on CNN to fire Roland Martin over violent comments



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Martin, who is a CNN contributor, has a history of stepping in it when it comes to gay civil rights issue.  There was the time he defended his wife's effort to cure gay people, and the time he compared being gay with being a drunk or a thief.   Martin also, for example, defended comedian Tracy Morgan who "joked" about stabbing his own son to death if he found out the boy were gay.  Considering the Tracy Morgan brouhaha happened less than a year ago, it's all the more strange that Martin published two tweets yesterday that seemed to advocate violence against gays.

One tweet was about a rather homoerotic David Beckham ad that ran at the beginning of the Super Bowl. I was at a friend's house and stopped dead in my tracks when I caught the ad out of the corner of my eye.  It did seem an odd ad for the Super Bowl, not that some gay men and women don't watch the Super Bowl too (and after all, Madonna was the half-time show, and you don't get any gayer than that).  Still, when Martin tweeted about smacking the sh*t out of any guy who liked the ad, you had to wonder about his later explanation that he meant it as a criticism of any guy who liked soccer, rather than any guy who enjoyed the homoerotic underwear ad.

Then you get to a second Tweet that Martin wrote about the Super Bowl yesterday:


Harder to write that one off as being about anything other than a subtle (or not) anti-gay slur.  The guy is wearing pink (this is a photo of the pink suit days earlier), girls wear pink, so the guy needs to be beaten.  If you're straight, you might think that this isn't necessarily about being gay.  If you're gay, you recognize immediately the origin of comments bashing guys for dressing girly.  In Chicago where I grew up, we used the expression "that's so gay."  The expression wasn't intended to be about gays either.  But it was. 


It may seem subtle, but if you think about it, it's really not.  Considering Martin keeps having these anti-gay bimbo eruptions - and now he is for the third time seemingly defending jokes about anti-gay violence - we're well past the time that clarifications are enough.  I get that people mis-speak.  I get that sometimes people are too sensitive and misinterpret things.  But how many times does Roland Martin have to mis-speak in support of bigotry before it indicates something about the man in addition to his mouth?


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