So Emily Rooney thinks it's funny to "smack the ish" out of gay men . . .

As you may have heard, CNN anchor Roland Martin was recently suspended for tweeting the following during the Super Bowl:

‘If a dude at your Super Bowl party is hyped about David Beckham's H&M underwear ad, smack the ish out of him!’

His managers (quite correctly) surmised that what Martin meant to communicate to his many followers was something like, "If there's a gay guy at your Super Bowl party, you owe it to yourself to beat the shit out of him!"

Well, GLAD immediately protested, and Martin has been off the job ever since - even though he insisted that his tweets were only "a light-hearted joke."

Yeah, right.  But guess what - WGBH's Emily Rooney agrees with him.

Actually, Martin at least wised up and later made something of an apology on his website, where he wrote:

'To those who construed my comment as being anti-gay or homophobic or advancing violence, I'm truly sorry. I can certainly understand how someone could come to a different conclusion than the one I meant.'

But on tonight's edition of Beat Off the Press - oh sorry, Beat the Press (which I was only watching because I couldn't reach the remote) - when guest panelist Kara Miller hailed CNN's management for taking action against Martin, Rooney loudly disagreed, stating that she "would not have in a million years determined that to be somehow anti-gay."  (You can watch it all toward the end of the clip at top.)

To which I can only say -

OMG, it's an incitement to violence!  (The offending ad.)

Is she fucking kidding?

For the record, Callie Crossley seemed to agree with Emily; she felt the case "wasn't quite that clear."  Yeah, right.  Somehow I think if Martin had been tweeting about "smacking the ish" out of women - or people of color, Crossley would have had a conniption.  But the idea of a black man tweeting about beating up a gay man . . . well, maybe she's half-down with that.  Or at least, she felt CNN needed "a more consistent policy." Maybe one that named every protected group specifically, I suppose . . .

As for Rooney, she rambled on that the tweet was indeed "Dumb . . . " then added with a knowing leer, "But he was probably having a few brews!!"  Uh-huh.  Tell us about it, Emily.

Okay, so Emily Rooney gets a kick out of open anti-gay bigotry, as long as you're drunk when you say it.  And so does Callie Crossley, unless there is a specific policy in effect against it.  Good to know!  And it's certainly interesting that WGBH's standards of hate speech are actually lower than CNN's.  (Because if Rooney and Crossley were working there, they'd be out of a job right now, wouldn't they.)

Still, all I can say is - it's really too bad Jared Bowen wasn't on the show that night!