Appearing Monday on Fox News' Fox &
Friends, Tammy Bruce decried the outrage that pressured Kyler
Murray to apologize for old homophobic tweets.
Hours after winning the Heisman Trophy,
which recognizes college football's top player of the year, Murray,
21, apologized for tweets, written when he was 14 or 15, in which he
used the word “queer” to insult others.
(Related: Heisman
Trophy winner Kyler Murray apologizes for old homophobic tweets.)
Bruce, who is openly gay, defended
Murray and suggested that USA Today, which broke the news, had
held back on reporting on the tweets until it would harm Murray the
most.
“All of us have said something, when
we were kids or even as adults, in the moment. And yet, there is this
in a weird way this demand that you genuflect in front of the people
with whom you may have or maybe didn’t offend. It’s become
dangerous.”
“Look, the civil rights movement, all
the civil rights movements, were about asking society to not punish
us because we might not be understood sometimes, or because we’re
different, or because we offend or make people necessarily afraid
because of different lifestyle choices, or because we look different,
right.”
“And yet, now we’ve gone into a
stage where we’re turning back to that framework by the inheritors
of the civil rights movement in trying to destroy us for sometimes
making a mistake, using a word that’s not approved of, or because
we frighten or offend people because of a different lifestyle choice.
This has got to end.”
“They must have known, because, in
this case it was a USA Today columnist. Holding it for that
one moment when you're in the spotlight. Holding it to when it would
harm you the most. It's obscene. It's pathetic. It's dangerous,
also,” she said, adding that every one should stand up and say it's
“unacceptable.”