BECAUSE THAT'S EVEN WORSE THAN TAKING STEROIDS!
Don't you just love how homophobia can crop up in any old situation without nary a warning? I bet you didn't think that major league baseball's recent steroid scandal had any gay connection, did you? Well, it doesn't but that didn't stop New Jersey tabloid The Trentonian from giving readers this headline about baseball pitcher Roger Clemens:

Can't you just picture the juvenile twits who came up with that headline cackling with laughter and patting themselves on the back for being so witty? "We said Roger Clemens 'took it the butt'! Hehehe! That's guh-ross!"

Don't worry heterosexual sports lovers! Your All-American icon Roger Clemens didn't really take "it in the butt". At least not in the way The Trentonian "cleverly" implied in this headline last month. After all, doing that would be much worse than what Clemens allegedly did — cheat by injecting steroids.

Believe it or not, this newspaper actually won a Pultizer Prize way back in 1974, thought it's apparently been downhill since then. This isn't the first time the tabloid has dabbled in homophobia while covering sports. When Sheryl Swoopes came out a couple of years ago the paper mocked the "big" news and Swoopes' cultural relevancy.

According to Wikipedia.org, The Trentonian is editorially conservative (surprise!) and owned by the Journal Register Company (JRC) which owns dozens of papers in the northeast United States. And JRC doesn't exactly enjoy a stellar reputation with at least one website — JRC Bites — documenting the papers foibles including some other reported examples of homophobia.

According to the the site, when Brokeback Mountain won three Oscars, the story was going to be on the front page until the publisher reportedly said "I do not want any gay cowboys on the cover of this paper! Go with a hot girl!" Ah, journalistic integrity! The same publisher struck again when New Jersey held that state's first civil unions and the front page article was supposed to include photos of two men kissing and two women kissing. But the publisher nixed the two men kissing (such as the one below from MSNBC.com) because it disgusted him.

But there is some good news about JRC. According to Wikipedia, the company is currently $726 million in debt and is rated as a bad stock investment. Bwa-ha-ha.