I hope in the fuoror over the sexist, assholish op-ed that the Murdoch owned Wall Street Journal published written by the lout Joseph Epstein, slamming Dr. Jill Biden for professionally using her actual title - Joey Epstein has one but it's one of those fake "honorary" PhDs handed out to whoever they managed to get to speak at a university commencement - I hope as people slam him they look into his skimpy history in attention getting through bigoted assholism because I remembered him doing it a half century ago when he went pretty much full-Nazi on gay folk. Here's David Ehrenstein commenting on him and what Harpers found fit to print back then.
"If I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of this earth," Epstein then declared. "I would do so because I think it brings infinitely more pain than pleasure to those who are forced to live with it; because I think there is no resolution for this pain in our lifetime, only, for the majority of homosexuals, more pain and various degrees of exacerbating adjustment; and because, wholly selfishly, I find myself completely incapable of coming to terms with it." That such an "admission" created an uproar is no surprise to anyone reading it today. But in 1970 it inspired an unprecedented protest demonstration in the offices of Harper's magazine by the Gay Activists Alliance, and that was followed in turn by a series of articles either in rebuttal and defense of Epstein and the protesters, some published as much as a decade after the inciting article. In fact, aftershocks of this contretemps continue to reverberate to this very day when gay and lesbian issues are taken seriously for the very reason that we are "out of the closet" that Epstein expected us to stay in when he first sat down to write.
"That is an essay that has followed me around," he recently informed Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times. "It was not meant to be an attack. But, in 1970, the subject of sexuality suddenly became politicized." Once that happens, all textured thinking goes out the window. I hope I don't have a reputation as a homophobe, which is really a stupid word."
In other words to deem a specified class of citizens worthy of eradication is "textured" thought, but when members of that class band together and fight back -- well that's "political" and therefore trayf. And to make matters worse, they have armed themselves with a word to use against the attackers. There has been much babbling of late in "elite" right-wing circles that homophobia isn't a "real word" because what it describes doesn't qualify for definition as a phobia at all. Obviously one can play semantic games until the proverbial cows come home, but as millions of post-Matthew Shepherd Americans gay and straight know perfectly well, virulent hatred of the same-sex oriented is real, and there's nothing "stupid" about the creation of the term homophobia to identify it.
I hope that as well as the weekend scribblage of the old asshole follows him to the grave as he fully knows it's the only thing anyone is ever going to remember him for. If he were sincere about having learned something from his desire for the obliteration of gay people from the Earth fifty years ago, he'd never have written such a piece of sexist crap in his dotage. I doubt he'd ever have written it about a man, certainly not a Republican man who uses his academic title. As it happens I know a lot of people in the education field who retain that custom, most of those I'm aware of, men. I can imagine his fellow faculty members when he was a visiting professor (visiting for decades, it seems) were in that habit.
The Wall Street Journal as well as all other Murdoch owned media will be attacking the Bidens and the Biden administration. Murdoch should be deported along with his entire family. I wouldn't wish them and the other trash that Republicans imported to pollute American media to promote oligarchy out of existence, just off of North American and barred from the media business so they couldn't promote bigotry and fascism elsewhere.
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