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MSNBC Anchor Joy Reid Apologizes For Homophobic Blog Posts

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 14:09 PST, Dec 3, 2017

MSNBC host Joy Reid has issued a lengthy apology about past blog posts that she wrote about Florida politician Charlie Crist in which she apparently implied that he was a closeted gay man. Reid authored the material, which recently surfaced on Twitter, about 10 years ago when she was a Florida political blogger and talk show host.

Mediaite summarized what Reid’s defunct blog, The Reid Report, was saying at the time about the elected official.

“Reid wrote numerous bigoted blog posts smearing, mocking, and attacking former Florida governor Charlie Crist. These rants included calling Crist ‘Miss Charlie’ and sarcastically using the tags ‘gay politicians’ and ‘not gay politicians’ — despite the fact that the twice-married, heterosexual man has never come-out as gay.”

Then a conservative Republican, Crist was the governor of Florida from January 2, 2007 to January 4, 2011. Rather than seek reelection for that job, he opted to run for U.S. Senate in 2010, first as a Republican, then as an independent, but lost to GOP candidate Marco Rubio in a three-way contest. He became a Democrat in 2012 and ran for governor in 2014 but lost to Republican incumbent Rick Scott. Crist’s luck changed (as did many of his political position in the process) when he narrowly won a U.S. House seat in 2016 as a Democrat. He represents Florida’s 13th congressional district.

A very anti-Trump liberal/progressive pundit who hosts the political talk show AM Joy on MSNBC on the weekends from 10 a.m. to 12 noon Eastern Time, Reid has now apologized for what she wrote about Crist on The Reid Report, which was also the name of her prior MSNBC show that was cancelled in February 2015.

In a statement, an apparently humbled Reid deeply apologized to now-Congressman Crist as well as to her colleagues, viewers, and friends, but she also seemed to suggest that Crist’s alleged prior anti-LGBT views made it fair game.

“Let me be clear: at no time have I intentionally sought to demean or harm the LGBT community, which includes people whom I deeply love. My goal, in my ham-handed 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…My critique of anti-LGBT positions [Crist] once held but has since abandoned was legitimate in my view. My means of critiquing were not.”

At this writing, the Twitterverse is calling out Joy Reid for hypocrisy. Parenthetically, a few months ago, Joy Reid was accused of making racist comments about Irish Americans in connection with her personal criticism of White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, the retired U.S. Marine general, Irish Central recalled.

In a tweet, Charlie Crist seems to have given Joy Reid a pass on the homophobic blog content, however.

As the Inquisitr has previously chronicled, there is a history of MSNBC on-air talent apologizing for inflammatory remarks of various kinds.

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