Christian Voice Makes Stealth "Corrections"

I reported how PinkNews, a gay publication in the UK published an April Fool's article claiming a new technology was invented for cellphones which would allow the user to scam people in the vicinity and tell who was gay or not. Clearly such claims are a joke and no one with half a brain would take it seriously. But wife-beating, bigoted fundamentalist Stephen Green doesn't have half a brain, so he took it very seriously. You can see the actual content of his previous post in our original post. We took a screen capture of the column because we assumed that Green would either delete his silly remarks or edit them.

Editing a blog is a problem. Often one makes mistakes. Most are small typos and I have no problem when someone corrects them and doesn't inform the readers that a misspelled word was corrected. In fact, blogs that report every minor change made are annoying to me. But when you change your post in a substantial way it is the honest thing to inform people that you have done so. Stephen Green of Christian Voice does not share my view of honesty.

Green has rewritten his column in an attempt to wipe out the reality that he was a moron. I have no doubt he will fail in that endeavor given the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Here are the changes he made, without acknowledging them.

Remember how he started his column: "You really couldn't make it up." Well, of course, it was made up, it was a joke article and obviously so. But Green took it seriously, mainly, I suspect, because it confirmed the evil nature of those nasty gays. Green didn't realize it, but now pretends he did. His new column starts off saying: "You really couldn't make it up -- but Pink News did." Hmm, that fact was left out originally when he reported this as a factual thing.

He previously said this new device "is headline stuff for the website PinkNews," but now says "has become an April Fools Day headline for the website PinkNews" with no indication that he didn't realize the app was fake before.

Now, since he used the "existence" of this application to denounce gays would he remove the denunciations? Of course not! Those remain in place and worse. He now says that the fake app "was based on the reality that homosexual men are sadly driven towards picking up complete strangers for transient sexual encounters." Wow! I can see it now, an unhappy chauffeur driving a gay man to a sexual encounter with a transient who is a complete stranger (are there any other kind of strangers?). (Just joking folks, it is hard to take this man seriously.)

Even the fact that he was driven by his own bigotry to be taken in by this comedic article is another excuse to ratchet up the hate.

At the end he briefly admits, "I was initially taken in by Pink News's (sic) April Fool" but "only because it made so much sense to anyone with a tiny bit of knowledge of the 'gay scene' and or recent technological advances." I would agree that he has a "tiny bit" of knowledge regarding the "gay scene," a very tiny bit of knowledge. But I suspect it takes more than he actually has to comment on it.

But, hold on here. Let us define "initially." The word means, at first, or at the beginning. If you fall for something and catch the error a few minutes later, or a few hours later, hell, even a couple of days later, you can say you initially fell for the joke. But, Mr. Green took almost three weeks to catch on and then he "got it" only after it was being spread over the internet. In other words, he didn't initially fall for it, he fell for it hook, line and sinker. He was so bamboozled by it because he saw it as another opportunity to engage in his public hate moments toward gay people. He caught on eventually because left comments on his blog about it. Otherwise he would have remained as clueless as ever.

Green said he also "initially" thought it true due to technological advances and then mentions dating apps as proof. He is intentionally mixing apples and oranges. There is a gay dating app called Grindr. But is worlds apart from the technology claimed in the April Fools article. I've never seen the app, so I base my comments here on what I've read. As I understand it a man who wishes to meet other gay men can use this app. He puts in his profile and then goes about his daily business. Other men can do the same thing. If the phones with this apps are near each other they alert the owner.

This makes sense for gay men who are clearly a minority in society. Most men would not be suitable dates for gay men. Only other gay men are. But, contrary to some views, it is not always possible to know who is gay and who is not. Given the small pool of potential dates, and the difficult to discern who actually is in that pool, a technology like this makes more sense for gay men than say for straight men wanting to meet women.

But all this technology can do is take the information the users plug into it. This is a far cry from an app that would supposedly "scan" all the men in the vicinity and tell who is gay. And, even more absurdly it was supposed to tell whether they had fashion no-nos like pony tails, sandals with socks and fannypacks. Green claims his knowledge of technology allowed him to fall for this joke. In fact, it is his lack of knowledge about technology that allowed it.

Green ends his new edited column with "Life is going to imitate art here, make no mistake." Well, if anyone can make a mistake it is Stephen Green, he has proven that repeatedly. The new column, by the way, is dated April 1st, falsely giving the impression that what now appears on the website was written on April 1st. It was not. As far as I can tell this was only changed today, April 20th. I wrote my original article concerning Green on the 19th and posted it just after midnight, so on the 20th. The editing he has now done was not there at that time. So substantial rewrites were done on April 20th but are published under the date of April 1st. Not very honest of Mr. Green but definitely par for the course. Click on either column to see the full size version and this will allow you to compare them.