Thanks a lot, Zeke

I try to stay out of the nonsense that is the celebrity gossip trade, and I'm fairly successful in my efforts, however, one of the more recent stories has come to affect me personally and as a result, I must comment.

I speak of the over-exposed case of Isaiah Washington and his calling a cast mate a -gay slur- episode followed by his boiling over at the Golden Globes that he "never called [the castmate] a -gay slur-. Of course, this has caused much wringing of hands for everyone over at ABC, because they don't want to cut him off of Grey's Anatomy because he is one of the stars, but at the same time they don't want to be seen as soft on bigotry with the ever-increasingly powerful homo-lobby affectionately known by some as the "gay mafia".

The Disney solution is officially 2-pronged: 1) Publicly wagging a finger at the actor 2) (and this is where it affects me) Disney is requiring ALL employees under their vast umbrella to go through a 4-5 lesson online course on tolerance.

The upside is we get to do it on company time so it's not going to cut into my abundant free time away from work, but the nature of my job is such that there is a lot of down time, and the last thing I want is to fill it up reading pages and listening to lessons about why it is inappropriate to use slurs or derogatory language and then take stupid multiple choice tests that ask things like "If you know a co-worker is openly gay you should a) ask him/her incessantly about life as a gay person b) make fun of their homosexuality c) try to fix them up with members of the opposite sex d) treat them like any other person in the workplace. And from this I will learn to be more tolerant of others....while also learning to hate the makers of online training courses even more than ever before.

Thanks, Isaiah, thank a lot....-gay slur-

Jasmyme Cannick has a "provocative commentary" on the situation here
Excerpted:
"At the end of the day, the issue for me and many Black Americans was the fact that in the beginning this was the issue of one man’s word against another and without any further evidence, all of white gay America pounced on Washington defending their beloved Knight.
At the same time, there’s been no protest launched against Charles Knipp, a white gay man who dresses up in blackface as a character he calls Shirley Q. Liquor and describes as an inarticulate Black woman on welfare with 19 kids...even going as far as to use sexually transmitted diseases as names of Black children.

" Knipp’s characterizations of Black woman played out on stage in city after city are ones that portray Black women as being on welfare, living in the projects, illiterate, sexually promiscuous mothers who don’t know who their children’s fathers are, alcoholics, and drug addicts.
So let me get this straight, no pun intended, it’s not ok for the Black guy to use the f-word, but it is ok for the white gay guy to dress up in blackface and perform parodies that mock Blacks."