Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

You appear to have missed a couple of words out of the headline

To the Daily Star, then. A comic for wankers at the best of times, and at least it's not trying to take over the anti-Muslim outrage from its big (and not very pleasant) brother, the Daily Express, this time, but even so, this story was particularly pisspoor:

12 GAY PREM FOOTIE STARS OUTED

it barks. Really? Oh, hang on a minute, they appear to have left the words 'haven't been' out of the headline:

At a forum to launch an anti-homophobia campaign, pundit and ex-England Under-21 star Paul Elliott, 44, said he knew 12 top current players who were gay.
The ex-Chelsea defender, who advises the Equality and Human Rights Comm- ission, said he would never reveal the names.

Oh, right then. So what form of 'outing' is this exactly? In what way have they been 'outed'? They haven't been outed at all. Elliott says there's 12 gay Premiership footballers. That's more than likely; it would be astonishing in any line of work, no matter how macho the supposed credentials, that not a single person who did it was gay. But have they been outed? Well no, not in the sense of outed, but in the sense of 'not being outed in the fucking slightest, you clueless bunch of gibbering cunts'. I think that clears things up for everyone.

Yes yes, I know, it's a pathetically dismal attempt to try and get people to buy the paper by pretending it was going to come up with the names, and then not coming up with the names, but... well, let's just say for a moment you'd bought the paper on the strength of the front-page story. Wouldn't you be just a teeny weeny bit pissed off that the fuckers had barefacedly lied to you about what they were going to say? Or would you be used to the constant lies and bullshit about Muslims, PC gone mad, immigration is raping our children and there's nothing we can do about it (they'll arrest you if you swear at a feral black child who's pouring bleach into your eyes, and there's nothing we can do about it!) and so on... maybe everyone's just desensitised to it all. So the front page of the paper lied... so what? But doesn't that just lower everyone's expectations?

Does anyone give a shit if a footballer's gay anyway? Well, there are the tabloids, who couldn't resist 'He's behind you, Gordon (and probably going to bum you into madness!)' infantile headlines when Peter Mandelson returned to government. It's not even as if Mandelson has ever been portrayed as having a voracious Glen Quagmire-style sexual appetite; he just happens to be gay. Mandelson is pretty much defined by the fact tht he's gay, as far as the Mike Gigglers of Fleet Street are concerned; I guess if you were a footballer, you wouldn't want that constant shite from them all the time, let alone what the scumbags on the terraces would do and say. Haven't we grown up about this yet? Apparently not...

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