The stupidest of their students become journalists, churning out illiterate attacks on dissidents from the liberal religion. Within a few weeks of each other in early 2006, both Rolling Stone and Newsweek magazines displayed their ignorance of Biblical passages cited during interviews. In a Rolling Stone interview, Republican senator Sam Brownback criticized countries like Sweden that had legalized gay marriage, quoting the line from Matthew “you shall know them by their fruits.”The interviewer, Jeff Sharlet, interpreted Brownback’s scriptural quotation as a homophobic slur. Soon gay groups were demanding an apology from the senator. (All I can say to that is: how niggardly of them.) [Townhall.com Excerpt from Godless]
Jeff Sharlet claims in his own defence that he was being evil rather than stupid, deliberately misinterpreting what Brownback said, as if he were one or the other of Beavis and Butthead, and then goes on to do it again:
Get it? "Niggardly"? Tee-hee-hee. See, Coulter understands that I was making fun of Brownback for accidentally using the word "fruits" with relation to gay Swedes, so she wittily responds by almost calling gay groups [slur omitted]."
No, she's calling them mindlessly politically correct, and comparing them to the people who persecuted David Howard in Washington DC, and Stephanie Bell for using the inoffensive word "niggardly" in front of people with small vocabularies.
Apparently Sharlet has never heard of these cases, even though if you do a Google search for the word, most of the first ten results refer to the controversy. See The Straight Dope: "Howard was pressured to resign by people who, as columnist Tony Snow put it, "actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance."But perhaps he does know, and is just being evil again, how could you tell?
