Box Turtle Bulletin

Love, Pat Boone Style

Earlier in the week we awarded Pat Boone with our LaBarbera Award for his equating of peaceful Proposition 8 demonstrations with the terrorist murder spree in Mumbai.

We weren’t the only ones to comment on Boone’s hateful screed. And finding himself “in the middle of a roiling, angry, often profanity-laced brouhaha”, Boone has taken the opportunity to tell the world of his love, love, love for homosexuals.

I need to say right here, honestly and unashamedly – I love gays. I always have, always will. I have proved it, over and over.

I’ve been in the entertainment business for over 50 years now, and I’ve had many dear and close friends, guys (and some gals) I have loved who were practicing homosexuals.

Me, homophobic? Ridiculous. I love my homosexual friends

Oh, feel the love. Ahhhh, love.

But before you start feeling all warm and fuzzy, Pat isn’t talking about you. He has a special type of homosexual friend that he loves: ex-gays. So much so, in fact, that he wrote two books about them.

Later (you may be surprised to learn), I really went out on a limb and wrote two books, about and with homosexual friends. The first was “Joy: A Homosexual’s Fulfillment,” and the second “Coming Out: True Stories of the Gay Exodus.” They were written with a longtime lesbian, a former very promiscuous male homosexual and with a transsexual man who had emasculated himself in an effort to be a woman. They’d been down the whole road and back again, and they told me their stories and how they’d each been able to leave the homosexual lifestyle. This was not expedient for me as an entertainer, but I did it out of real love for gays. I do care.

Pat also loves gays who are dying with AIDS. Especially if they are too weak to push him out of the room.

I felt slightly nauseated at the arrogance and self-satisfaction in this (frankly, abusive) tale:

I prayed with Rock Hudson and placed my hands on his bony chest, anointing him with oil, right at the end of his life. He couldn’t speak because of the lesions in his throat, but the grateful glow in his eyes told me all I needed to know. There was love between us – and I saw him off to heaven, too. I know I’ll see him there again.

But the one that really demonstrates Boone’s self-delusion is:

Years ago, I sat by the bed of one of my closest friends as he lay dying in a VA hospital. AIDS didn’t have a name yet, but that’s what was killing him. His teeth had fallen out; he had no immune system left. We prayed together, and I saw him off to heaven. I loved Roger.

Mind you, Roger died before Boone started writing his homophobic books. And while I find no date for the first one he listed, Coming Out was published in 1978. But, of course, since Roger was a “practicing homosexual”, Boone can just cheerfully declare that AIDS was “what was killing him”, regardless of the fact that the the virus wasn’t observed for several more years. A “wages of sin” story is just so loving. And convenient.

But unless you’re dying with AIDS or have “left the homosexual lifestyle”, Pat has other words he uses to express his love for you.

Words like “raging ” and “hordes of homosexual activists” and “gangster” and “criminal” and “militant” and “turbulent, abusive mob” and “irresponsible” and “violent” and “threatening” and “hedonistic” and “blindly selfish” and “homegrown sexual jihadists”.

No, Pat, you don’t love me. As you said in both of your articles, “Hate is hate, no matter where it erupts”, and you’ve certainly been erupting.

LaBarbera Award: Pat Boone

Pat Boone has definitely gone over the edge. In his latest outrage at WorldNetDaily, Boone tut-tuts the recent massacres at Mumbai, and draws a direct line of connection between that terrorist operation and demonstrations against Prop 8:

Thank God, it couldn’t happen here. Could it?

Look around. Watch your evening news. Read your newspaper.

Are you unaware of the raging demonstrations in our streets, in front of our churches and synagogues, even spilling into these places of worship, and many of these riots turning defamatory and violent? Have you not seen the angry distorted faces of the rioters, seen their derogatory and threatening placards and signs, heard their vows to overturn the democratically expressed views of voters, no matter what it costs, no matter what was expressed at the polls? Twice?

… Assuming you have become aware of all this, let me ask you: Have you not seen the awful similarity between what happened in Mumbai and what’s happening right now in our cities?

When terrorists launched their attack on Mumbai two weeks ago, they killed 163 people in a shocking carnage which is now being referred to as India’s 9/11. Contrast that to the demonstrations which have broken out all across American against the passage of Prop 8 — not riots, as Boone calls them, but demonstrations — which have all been remarkably peaceful. In fact, I challenge Boone to name a single riot on American soil since election day.

Boone isn’t the first to falsely characterize these peaceful protests as “violence” and “riots,” but he is the first well-known figure to claim that peaceful marchers are equivalent to militant Islamists with automatic weapons and grenades. Boone succeeds in raising the false “violence” charge to a whole new and disgusting level. All that’s missing now is a holocaust analogy. I’m sure we’ll see that before too long.