Rush Limbaugh pissed off advertisers, President Obama and all right-thinking Americans last week when he launched into a vicious tirade against Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke simply for defending birth-control coverage.
We’re glad the pill-popping serial monogamist was called out, but we wish people had shown their outrage earlier—like maybe during one of Windbag’s Limbaugh’s many attacks on the LGBT community?
Watchdog group Media Matters posted a piece today detailing just some of his anti-gay rhetoric. In November 2004, for example, he told a caller—a high-school teacher worried about her gay students being villified—that openly gay students were asking for trouble.
Limbaugh: What’s important when you go to school? Learning how to prepare yourself for the rest of your life or trumpeting your sexuality?
Caller: I don’t think anyone’s trumpeting their sexuality.
Limbaugh: Well, how do we know then that they’re gay if they’re not…
Caller: Certainly…
Limbaugh: How do we know it? How do we know who’s gay and who’s straight unless somebody’s out there making a big case about it?
Caller: No, no one’s making a big case…
Limbaugh: some people are inviting dissent.
Last fall, the shlock jock told listeners that Lawrence King, the 15-year-old murdered by a classmate for allegedly coming onto him, wanted a “chop-a-dick-offa’-me operation.”
He was showing up in school dressed as a woman… wearing dresses. He was bothering the other boys. His mother called the school. She was worried about her son’s behavior. She asked the school to keep a sharp eye out for him, that she was worried that his behavior was going to cause something unfortunate to happen to him. We’re talking 14-, and 15-, 16-year-olds here. Her son dresses up as a woman, goes to school, and starts lavishing attention on other boys.
When she told school officials about this, she says, again, that school officials told her that there was nothing they could do. That her son had a civil right to explore his sexual identity, meaning he had a right to come to school dressed as a girl. He had a right to come to school dressed in female attire—he was wearing dresses. He had a right to explore whether or not he was a woman in a boy’s body. He had the right to explore whether at some point he was going to need a chop-a-dick-offa’-me operation.
The weirdest anecdote, though, stems from an episode on November 28, 2011, when Rush mocked gay Rep. Barney Frank by playing the song “My Boy Lollipop” and making slurping noises.
We’d almost say Limbaugh was obsessed with gays, but even a passing thought of Rush as a closeted homosexual is enough to want us to take a Silkwood shower.
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
RJM
Apparently Rush never went to a high school dance or prom since the person you usually ask to go means you’re going on a date and what gay guy wants to go on a date with a girl or lesbian with a guy? What a clueless freak. Sexuality is clearly something more defined than he thinks in the school years. Does Limbaugh have children??
Steve
Because, when you disagree with someone over how to treat gays, its clearly all about politics. But when you disagree with someone over calling another person a “slut” and “whore”, then that’s when it suddenly becomes about respect and what not.
Basically, no one had the balls to make a political statement against Limbaugh even though, at this point in time, treatment of LGBT people shouldn’t be politics.
Cam
The thing to watch is how desperate the right wing is to deflect the subject.
They are using any means possible to attack the woman. Claiming she is an activist, this was her plan, etc…Basically pulling out a huge conspiracy theory.
The thing that is so hilarious, is that they can’t explain…if this was the women’s plan all along, then how did she get Rush to say what he said?
Rush’s last broadcast had over 80 commercials, only 9 of them were paid ads and not PSA’s. of those 9, 7 of them were for companies that have already demended that their commercials be taken off his show.
Glen Beck had far more advertisers and they still cancelled him.
Andy
@RJM: No, he doesn’t have children. He is working on his fourth divorce and he’s been caught with Viagra pills at the airport, so I’m guessing it don’t work. Angry little man taking out erectile difficulties on everyone.
Clockwork
For some reason the events coalesced with this incident to get sponsors to react. he has said way worse stuff over the years.
When his show started in 1988 and first few years after that, Rush was entertaining in an outrageous Dennis Miller Show kind of way, but he did not evolve his show it stayed mean, hypocritical, and way too partisian.
The Dennis Miller Show has it right at the moment with political comedy that balanced, sincere and not bitter, mean.
I do like talk radio as a resource and hope Rush Limbaugh’s demise help improves talk radio in the long run. As someone who listened to his show for 20 years I don’t think he can recover, he has only been digging a deeper hole this week.
ClearyJ
So what are you folks upset about? The language? Or that someone (say a child’s parents) objects to a kid in school having a right to dress in ways guaranteed (GUARANTEED) to provoke attention and a response? No – the victim didn’t deserve to be shot. And to my way of thinking the perp deserves to be put in jail a lot longer than what he ended up with. But this so-called “civil right” goes against a dictum I learned as a kid: your freedom to swing your arms ends where my nose begins. And actually – it ends a long way from my nose. You don’t have a civil right to get in my face. You don’t have a civil right to make my life a nightmare. You don’t have a right to smell like onions and stale meat, dress with flashing lights all over your head, and play noise at 150db. While you may have a civil right to dress any way you want to (and I think you do), you have no civil right to being accepted by those around you. I have an equal civil right to shun you if I want to, and you have a like right to shun me. I don’t have to let you in my club, and you shouldn’t have to let me in yours. Or are LGBT so-o-o-o special that they are “more equal than others?”
[email protected]
NOT JUST ADVERTISERS BUT THE TAXPAYER-FUNDED ARMED FORCES NETWORK should dump Limbaugh for his promotion of misosgyny, racism, and homohatred that violate the mandate of the DOD’s Human Rights Charter and Military Equal Opportunity Program to promote respect for everyone. People in the services have complained before about the hours of his demagoguery AFN broadcasts to our troops around the world everyday, but the meat puppets at AFN insist that they have to because a federal law allegedly requires them to make available to those in the military any programming received in the States. That’s interesting given that no less than Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin has urged them to stop giving Limbaugh access to airwaves paid for by OUR tax dollars. Sadder still, some gays are defending it, claiming it’s just about “free speech” without understanding that the Constitution doesn’t also guarantee a platform. Would they defend AFN broadcasting a show by the KKK calling for lynchings?
ChiGuy76
Actually, Rush’s advertisers should have dumped him years ago because he does not have the 20 million listeners he claimed he had……..20 YEARS AGO!!!!!! Even then that number was an estimate/projection made up by his publicist. He never had that big of an audience EVER. It is just that the mainstream media never questione or investigated his claims until recently with the birth better technology that measures viewership. I personally think his sponsors should think about suing him for fraud.
Jared
I don’t know if you knew this or not. But the right wing has stopped talking about Sandra Fluke. Actually the only ones who are talking about her is the left wing. Wow some people need to learn the facts before writing such stupid comments.
Jared
@Cam: Where do you get your information at? Nothing is true in what this dumbass says. Wait did I say “dumbass”? Yes I did. Just like if you have sex alot and you can’t pay for education. Then that does make you a slut. Truth has always been hard to take. That’s way this society rather believe lies. It’s just easier. At least Rush Limbaugh apologized, even if he didn’t mean it, at least he said it.
melissa baker
in his palm beach gym, the walls are painted with murals featuring naked roman gladiators with enlarged genitalia. go figure?
Alexa
@Jared: the right wing may or may not have stopped talking about Sandra Fluke, but they are still talking about the subject – only now they are attacking Bill Maher (ironic as he has defended Limbaugh). If they’ve stopped talking about her it’s only because they know they are losing. Deflect. Deflect. Deflect.
In your next post you exhibit the same basic lack of knowledge as Limbaugh did, which makes you the dumbass. The contraceptive pill is not like Viagra; it doesn’t need to be taken every time you have sex, it is taken regularly whether you have sex ten times a day or never have sex at all. It is also taken for purposes other than contraception. I don’t have sex with men but I took the pill for almost a year for a medical condition completely unrelated to sex.
jason
Sandra Fluke does not have the right to receive birth control coverage. If she wants to use it, she should pay from her own pocket. I don’t ask the taxpayer to fund my condoms or my vasectomy.
Note how all these liberal women are for chemically altering their bodies through the pill but they’re against using chemicals to grow vegetables. Interesting, isn’t it?
J Ascher
@Jason: since men’s contraception and erectile dysfunction medicines are covered under employer health plans, so too should women’s! This isn’t about abortion or anything like that! It’s about equal access to the same type of medical coverage for everyone.
monroeplace
No kids. On his fourth wife. Hmmmmmm?
Shannon1981
Rush Limbaugh has made millions- MILLIONS I TELL YOU being a bigoted, misogynist, racist, homophobic PIG on right wing talk radio for the last 30 years. You’r right, Queerty, he should have been castigated as he is now long ago.
I think the bigger issue is that talk radio as we know it is going out of style. This is a right wing phenomenon. The closest the left gets is say, Bill Maher or Jon Stewart, and still, since we don’t roll around in bigotry like the right does, what they do would never go anywhere near the level of bigotry the Limbaughs, Hannitys, and Savages, et al of the world do. Be gone, right wing talk radio. This is the last straw. You do not get to collect millions for being terrible people with a platform from which to spew your bile on a daily basis any longer.
Shannon1981
hmmmm testing.. I am being flagged..
Alexa
@Shannon1981: me too. I suspect it’s because I used the brand name of an erectile dysfunction medicine and was flagged as spam (trust me, I have zero interest in promoting EDF medicine LOL). I guess I’ll know if this one makes it through.
@jason: more ignorance. Tax payers have nothing to do with this, it’s private health insurance. And, as J Ascher said, men are covered, only women are not (sorry to burst your misogynist bubble there, sweetie). And there are non-contraceptive uses for the pill, which is actually what Sandra Fluke’s testimony was about.
Paparocky
So which closeted homophobe would look more like Aunt Bee of Mayberry in drag:
J. Edgar Hoover or Rush Limbaugh?
the other Greg
@ChiGuy76: I hope you’re right, and I’ve often wondered about that. Who can listen to the radio obsessively at such an odd time period?
Think about it, Rush Limbaugh’s radio audience from noon to 3pm:
– traveling salesmen
– warehouse workers
– unemployed, bigoted white losers
– retired elderly cranks (GOP = the Grumpy Old People’s party)
But this easily adds up to 20 million, unfortunately!