When I was young, Michael Medved was a film critic with a mustache that was not entirely out of cultural context. As time went by, though, he realized that, instead of having opinions about individual films, he was more interested in having one opinion about all films: namely, that they are a stinking cesspool of moral relativism, violence, non-procreative sex and needlessly expensive stunt sequences. He didn’t seem to mind the stunts as much as the relativism, though, and gradually he kind of honed in on the first three. His mustache came to seem more like a political statement: a wash of hair that stood proudly athwart every grooming trend after, say, 1982, yelling “stop.” He began his second career: as an all-purpose scourge of things. Almost all things, pretty much based on whatever the conservative media scene was outraged about that week. Now, displaying the keen news instincts that made him one of the Top 50 Conservative Pundits with Facial Hair, Medved is weighing in on Tim Hardaway’s comments on L’Affaire Meech about a week after even this site stopped talking about it. His contrarian take…will probably not surprise you. But here goes:

Tim Hardaway (and most of his former NBA teammates) wouldn™t welcome openly gay players into the locker room any more than they™d welcome profoundly unattractive, morbidly obese women. I specify unattractive females because if a young lady is attractive (or, even better, downright œhot) most guys, very much including the notorious love machines of the National Basketball Association, would probably welcome her joining their showers. The ill-favored, grossly overweight female is the right counterpart to a gay male because, like the homosexual, she causes discomfort due to the fact that attraction can only operate in one direction. She might well feel drawn to the straight guys with whom she™s grouped, while they feel downright repulsed at the very idea of sex with her.

Many gay activists suggest that this near-universal straight male repulsion at the idea of sex with another man is merely the product of cultural conditioning: a learned prejudice that ought to be unlearned. This represents the core message of gay pride parades and even the drive for same-sex marriage: an effort to persuade all of society that gay sex is as beautiful as straight sex, and to œcure men of their visceral disgust at the very thought of what two (or more) male homosexuals do with one another.

According to the œenlightened advocates of gay liberation, this disgust gets to the very essence of œhomophobia “ an altogether unjustified fear and distaste for male-on-male physical intimacy. When Hardaway says œI hate gay people what he suggests at the deepest level is that he feels revolted by the very notion of same-sex eroticism and that he™d prefer not to face the distraction of such thoughts in the locker room or on the court.

Those who insist that basketball teams or submarine crews must welcome gay recruits must, for the sake of consistency, argue for the same welcome to teammates of the opposite gender. That notion “ that a male player could, for instance, join a WNBA team without serious problems “ shows the way that political correctness now seems to deny the obvious, often overwhelming potency of human sexuality.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, especially since the fog of sublimated sex stank — both in the fervid, fetid bit about the “hot” woman sharing showers with the NBA’s “notorious love machines” (screenplay treatment, stat!) and the revulsion/fixation at what gay couples (or more than two of them!) get up to — is so thick. It’s nice to be reminded, though, that for all the weak coverage of this story, and even the ugliness of Hardaway’s comments, there is something more cynical and arguably uglier than Tim’s raw ignorance. That would be the cynical, ugly opportunism of a third-tier, third-class chump who would take Amaechi’s testimony — a story that takes no small measure of courage to tell — and make it about their hackneyed, one-size-fits-all intellectual crusade. Also, while I know this is maybe more ad hominem than necessary, look at the picture of Medved next to his byline. Does he not look kind of like Keith Hernandez receiving a white phosphorus enema in that photograph? Or is that my natural revulsion speaking? The story came courtesy of The New Republic’s blog “The Plank.”