Sunday July 13, 2008
I found this piece by way of Mark Morford's blog over at the SF Gate, and I gotta tell you, it's one of the funniest things I've seen all day. It has nothing to do with Paganism or Wicca, but instead is about a right-wing evangelical group and why sanitizing your news feeds can be problematic.
We've talked before about the American Family Association (AFA), which is the delightful group that sends out a list of retailers every year at Christmas time... you know, which retailers are Good and American, and which ones are the Evil Pawns of De Debbil. Well, apparently the folks over at AFA have their own IT specialists, because their website has some really interesting features. For starters, they've set it up to block traffic from websites they don't approve of -- heck, I'm not even sure you can navigate there from here, but I'm sure we'll find out.
Another nifty thing they've done is create an auto-replace feature in their newsfeed service. This allows them to replace objectionable words with words that are apparently not as offensive. For instance, the word "gay" is replaced by "homosexual" every time it appears in a news feed, because the AFA doesn't want you to think there's anything happy or fun about being homosexual. Well, this is great news for Olympic hopeful Tyson Gay, who got an entire article dedicated to the trials and tribulations of Tyson Homosexual.
Since the Tyson Homosexual page first appeared, evidently the IT guys have fixed the problem, and his name does appear correctly in the updated version, but man, that is totally worth the time it took people to do a screenshot. No word yet on what could happen when they want to boycott Bravo TV over "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy", or if they ever have an interview with Dick Van Dyke.
Just for fun, read why the AFA wants you to boycott McDonald's... and it has nothing to do with the food.
The AFA Has a Gay Old Time