So Tucker Carlson is a Gay-Basher

And when I say “gay-basher,” I don’t mean the “loves to verbally insult gays” type of gay-basher. I mean the “I physically assaulted a man who came onto me in a bathroom” type of gay-basher. Here’s the video:

The key section starts at about 3:00. Essentially, Carlson claimed that he was once “bothered” in a public restroom by a man looking for sex. His response to the incident, by his account was: “I went back with someone I knew and grabbed the guy by the — you know, and grabbed him, and … hit him against the stall with his head, actually.”

Oh, and everyone else on the show found this hilarious.

Many have suggested that Carlson was lying about the incident. This is definitely a possibility. Since the original airing, MSNBC has left this section out of subsequent screenings. Carlson has also responded to the furor with this comment:

Let me be clear about an incident I referred to on MSNBC last night: In the mid-1980s, while I was a high school student, a man physically grabbed me in a men’s room in Washington, DC. I yelled, pulled away from him and ran out of the room. Twenty-five minutes later, a friend of mine and I returned to the men’s room. The man was still there, presumably waiting to do to someone else what he had done to me. My friend and I seized the man and held him until a security guard arrived.

As far as I see it, there are three distinct possibilities here:

1. Carlson told the truth about his attack the first time around. This makes him a gay-bashing asshole.
2. Carlson told the truth in his second account of the incident. This makes him an asshole who sees nothing wrong with embellishing a story to make it seem like he is a gay-bashing asshole.
3. The whole response is made-up. This still makes him someone who sees nothing wrong with assaulting gays, and in fact sees being a gay-bashing asshole as the preferred mode of existence.

Notice how in all of those situations, Tucker Carlson is still a gay-hating asshole who is also either a gay-basher or on the verge of being one? No matter what the truth about the incident is, his actions on the show were 100% unacceptable, hateful and condoning of violence against gays.

If you’d like to tell him and the show what you think, the email address for the show is Tucker@msnbc.com.

UPDATE: In addition to providing feedback to the email address above, Media Matters is running a campaign to have MSNBC higher-ups address the situation directly. All of the contact information for the targeted individuals can be found through the link.