Friday, January 11, 2008

Uh... that's nice?

I don't think I blogged about it at the time, but a while back some guy was taking the Massachusetts bar exam and failed it. So he decided to sue because, he said, he failed because he refused to answer a question about gay marriage.

Well, now he says he's gotten over it, and has publicly apologized:
"After speaking with numerous members of the gay community, including my own friends, I began to empathize with their denial of basic human rights and how they feel discriminated against," Stephen Dunne said Thursday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Dunne, an Irish immigrant who first came to the United States in 1998, said the change also was prompted in part by racism the Irish once faced in the U.S., his six-year stint in the Army and the war in Iraq.

"Members of the gay community are in combat and dying for their country and yet they're being denied the basic human rights they are fighting for," he said.

Dunne first apologized for being an "instrument of bigotry and prejudice" in an e-mail published in the Jan. 3 edition of Bay Windows, a weekly Boston newspaper aimed at the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

In the letter, he said his "misguided" lawsuit "regrettably perpetuated intolerance and animosity towards my fellow Americans."

Well... some people in the article seem to think this was all a hoax to get the man some publicity, but if it's genuine, that'd be great. I'd like to think that the virulently homophobic can one day become normal human beings. But I'm not really counting on it.

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