So I'm reading along, enjoying this pleasant little story by the AP about UConn hockey players appearing in PSAs in which they not only pledge their support to "any teammate, gay or straight, that can help us win games" but do so with a welcome matter-of-factness—as if they were telling you something obvious and unimpeachable, like "change your smoke-alarm batteries"—and then I get to this part:

Peter Wolfgang, president of the conservative Family Institute of Connecticut Action, said he has no problem with the team participating in an anti-bullying campaign, but he is concerned about the references to "homophobia" in the video.

"It's a very loaded political term," he said. "If we're going to be against bullying, then we ought to be against all forms of bullying and not just the kind that get us a pat on the back from politically correct elites. I would hope that people that have traditional beliefs, traditional faiths that they would not be bullied for holding views about morality or the definition of marriage."

What is this shit?

I'm not even talking about Peter Wolfgang, who by all appearances is just a dime-a-dozen bigot wrapping his boring old chauvinism in cheap faith and whiny grievance. I'm talking about the AP, which feels compelled to phone up that dime-a-dozen bigot to get his side of a story with which he has fuck-all to do. This is like covering a flower show and asking a Boston Terrier for his opinion. Why does Peter Wolfgang get to toot his own stupid bugle for two paragraphs? The answer: "Balance." "Objectivity." Gayness is a "controversy," you see, and all controversies have two sides.

I know it's just two throwaway paragraphs in a wire story—it's a small miracle for the industry that the AP is even willing to send a reporter to Storrs, Conn.—but this kind of craven shit is how the weasels get invited into the national living room. This is how we get a little bit dumber. A reporter or editor somewhere decides that all real knowledge can be found only at a point equidistant between two competing claims, no matter if one of those claims deserves as much attention and respect as the guy with the shopping cart screaming at the contrails in the sky. Crazy gets normalized. Stupid gets a hearing. You know how you can tell we're in an election year? Even the sportswriters are acting like Politico.

[AP]