Joy Reid, the host of MSNBC's AM
Joy, on Sunday apologized for homophobic comments about former
Florida Governor Charlie Crist.
Reid wrote a dozen blog posts over a
two year period in which she referred to Crist as “Miss Charlie”
and urged him to come out of the closet.
The posts, written from 2007-2009, were
first
reported by Mediaite.
“This note is my apology to all who
are disappointed by the content of blogs I wrote a decade ago, for
which my choice of words and tone have legitimately been criticized,”
Reid said in a statement given to Fox News.
“As a writer, I pride myself on a
facility with language – an economy of words or at least some
wisdom in the selection,” she said. “However, that clearly has
not always been the case.”
At the time that Reid wrote the posts,
Crist was a Republican and rumors about his sexuality swirled in the
media. He was also opposed to marriage equality and giving gay men
and lesbians parental rights. (At the time, Florida had the nation's
only law that prohibited gay people from adopting based solely on
their sexual orientation.)
“Miss Charlie, Miss Charlie, Stop
pretending, brother,” Reid wrote in a 2007 post. “It's okay that
you don't go for the ladies.”
After Crist entered his second marriage
to Carole Rome in 2008, Reid described Crist as dreading their
honeymoon.
“I can just see poor Charlie on the
honeymoon, ogling the male waiters and thinking to himself, 'god, do
I actually have to see her naked...?” Reid wrote.
She added that the only reason Crist
married Rome was to boost his chances of becoming Arizona Senator
John McCain's 2008 running mate as he sought the White House.
“The Florida governor didn't get
tapped by John McCain (get your mind out of the gutter! I meant
'tapped' to be his veep...) and he married the rich lady anyway!”
Reid wrote.
In apologizing, Reid said that she was
attempting to call out Crist's potential hypocrisy.
“My goal, in my hamhanded way, was to
call out potential hypocrisy. Nonetheless, as someone who is not a
member of the LGBT community, I regret the way I addressed the
complex issue of the closet and speculation on a person's sexual
orientation with a mocking tone and sarcasm. It was insensitive,
tone deaf and dumb,” she said.
In 2012, Crist left the Republican
Party and became a Democrat. He also reversed his positions on
several LGBT rights, including marriage and adoption.
Mediaite retrieved posts from Reid's
blog, which no longer exists, using an
Internet archive.