From this week's LEO...

'Tis summer, the republicans hate gays
It's gay-bashing season in Kentucky, also known as "an election year." Republicans, campaigning behind a morbidly flaccid governor and a spectacularly failed president, are trotting out the ol' tried and true: homophobia. Last week saw a minor stampede by republicans to be on the wrong side of this generation's noisiest civil rights issue.

Caught in the crossfire are University of Kentucky employees, Surgeon General nominee James Holsinger, and super-sexy hetero stud muffins Jack Conway and Dan Mongiardo. UK, hoping to become more competitive in the fornication-friendly world of academia, cleverly rewrote its health-benefits package to include "an unrelated adult," whether or not that adult and the employee are knocking boots in the conventional sense. In other words, UK hopes to provide the necessary benefits to snag top-level faculty and staff, whether they are married, unmarried, gay, straight, or just plagued by that annoying friend who moved in back in '05 and won't get off the couch.

Naturally, the announcement got heterosexual-marriage advocates hotter than last month's issue of Maxim. Kentucky Republican Party chairman Steve Robertson sent an op-ed piece to local newspapers around the state dragging Conway and Mongiardo into the mess, calling them "Gretels," which caused citizens statewide to snicker uncontrollably.

Meanwhile, The Family Foundation's anal-sex expert David Edmunds wrote a passionate Courier-Journal op-ed in defense of Holsinger, citing Holsinger's recognition that the "reproductive and digestive systems are separate and unique," which is clearly the kind of insight one looks for in a surgeon general (and the kind of op-ed one savors from the commonwealth's most-distinguished editorial page). Holsinger, who, like Edmunds, apparently never has sex unless it's for reproductive purposes, wrote a paper in 1991 condemning anal sex, which outraged the gay community. That outrage in turn outraged many local heterosexuals, who claimed, "hey, we like anal sex too!" With the outbreak of Puritanism, it might seem like nobody's getting fucked in Kentucky, but that's not true: The countless hardworking, talented gay workers in Kentucky get nailed just about every time they open a newspaper - or spend money on healthcare.