You can’t help but feel a little sorry for Amanda Beck.  She’s a reporter from Reuters who was among the first to cover a new study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, which warns about an outbreak of a virulent, drug-resistant, and potentially deadly strain of Staph infection afflicting certain segments of the homosexual community. 

Although outbreaks of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, have primarily been confined to hospitals in the past, the study determined that, due to “high risk behaviors” beyond hospital walls — such as “anal sex” — men who have sex with men are now 13 times more likely to contract the infection. 

Because this particular strain can be transmitted through “skin-to-skin contact,” researchers fear the outbreak “has the potential for rapid, nationwide dissemination” and will spread to “the general population.”  Once it does, they say it will be “unstoppable.”   

The initial reporting by some in the mainstream media, even The New York Times, was fairly accurate and balanced.  It superficially addressed the study’s lucid data and sound conclusions. 

But all that quickly changed.         

You see, by even reporting on this study, Amanda Beck and her media codefendants deviated from the script.  They broke the rules.  And in so doing, they really, really ticked off that 500-pound homosexual activist gorilla and his yappy, apple polishing lapdogs back at media central.       

Here’s where Amanda went wrong.  She objectively provided scientific information to the public which cast “high risk” homosexual conduct in a negative light.  She led people to a credible medical study that underscores the potential consequences of a demonstrably dangerous and desperately empty lifestyle. 

She dared to report the study’s genuine findings, and for that, Amanda Beck and her media co-condemned will, no doubt, be working the obits beat in journalistic Siberia until they’ve successfully completed obligatory “sensitivity” training. 

Dr. Binh Diep, the researcher who led the study, told Reuters, “Once this reaches the general population, it will be truly unstoppable … ‘We think that it's spread through sexual activity.’”

And the fan was thusly and most directly hit. 

Now began the backpedaling: “Move along, folks, nothing to see here,” seemed to bark The New York Times, Newsweek and other media outlets.  “Ignore that homosexual pressure group behind the curtain.” 

Following the lead of “gay” activists, the mainstream media desperately scrambled to change the subject, engaging in a classic “kill-the-messenger” strategy.  The researchers who conducted the study were even attacked, and calls by groups like Concerned Women for America (CWA) to end political promotion of the “high-risk behaviors” associated with the outbreak were warped through a prism of obfuscation and misdirection.

Homosexual groups and the media set up a mean ol’ straw man and took to knocking the stuffing out of him. Conservative organizations were suggested to have claimed the outbreak was “the new AIDS,” a “new gay disease” and “the gay plague,” all things which nobody I know ever implied.

They mischaracterized a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statement on the controversy as a repudiation of the study (which, of course, it was not).   “There is no evidence at this time to suggest that MRSA is a sexually-transmitted infection in the classical sense,” read the statement.  Again, nobody said MRSA was “a sexually-transmitted infection in the classical sense.” (Emphasis added).  The study merely found that, as it pertains to certain segments of the “gay” community, it was being transmitted through “high-risk” sexual behaviors. 

The New York Times disingenuously reported that the researchers had “issued an apology” for releasing “their findings.”  “We deplore negative targeting of specific populations in association with MRSA infections or other public health concerns,” said Dr. Henry Chambers in what hardly amounted to “an apology.”     

But the coup de grâce came when Kevin Berger — some cat over at Salon Magazine — personally attacked me.  He noted that a handful of professional football players with turf burns had also contracted MRSA. 

So desperate was he to downplay this behaviorally related MRSA outbreak among “gays” that he wrote an entire article built around the premise that, “It is fair to reason that more American men play football than have sex with one another.”   

That little bit of flapdoodle was so rich that I was tempted to respond in kind with an article but decided against it.  This poor fellow’s tortured logic betrays his folly.  I wouldn’t want to pile on.  It’d be like pulling a little girl’s pigtails, and I hate to appear “mean-spirited.”      Continued...