Posted: September 3, 2002

1:00 a.m. Eastern

© 2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Broadcasting from the Minneapolis affiliate of my radio show last week, I was treated to a Minnesota Twins game. Having become accustomed to baseball games at home in Los Angeles, I observed many differences at the Metrodome. Among them was an absence of foul language from the fans ­ I felt I had taken a time machine to the 1950s, so family-friendly was the atmosphere. I also appreciated the lack of instant replay on the stadium video screen. Apparently, the Twins management has the rare attitude that fans come to a baseball game to watch the game live, not on a TV screen.

But the Twins feature that most intrigued me was the kiss cam.

A couple of times between innings, a stadium camera focused on couples, who, when they saw themselves on the large stadium monitor inside a big red heart, gave each other a kiss. It was all quite innocent. I know, because I did not feel at all uncomfortable with my 9-year-old son, and I am zealous about guarding his innocence in the jaded culture America gives its children. Indeed, as often as not, the couples were in their later years, and when they kissed each other, we all felt good. Who isn't happy to see romance flourish in older couples?

And then a thought occurred to me: Wasn't the Metrodome engaging in discrimination? Surely, there were some same-sex couples at the ball game. Why weren't any of them shown kissing on the kiss cam? How could it be that in the state of libertarian Gov. Jesse Ventura and Sen. Paul Wellstone, perhaps the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, such discrimination could take place?

I raised this question on my radio show, and Minneapolis callers were unanimous in responding that whether Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, the vast majority of people attending a Twins game would not accept a kiss cam depicting two men or two women kissing each other.

If these callers were right ­ and I suspect they were ­ it means that even liberal and libertarian Minnesotans do not want to be confronted by public displays of homosexual affection, especially when children are present. But how can that be?

The answer is that many liberals engage in self-deception regarding homosexuality. Their rhetoric of tolerance and diversity has trapped them into losing touch with their own deepest values and intuitions. Liberals boycott the Boy Scouts because the Boy Scouts want to provide heterosexual scoutmasters as models for their boys. But when actually confronted with homosexuality, most liberals do not react with the acceptance they seek to impose on others.

A writer in a major gay journal noted the phenomenon years ago ­ how even his most liberal straight friends do not want him to kiss his boyfriends in front of their children.

In the depths of the consciences and hearts of the vast majority of heterosexual liberals, there is a voice that says that male-male or female-female sexual bonding is not quite the same as male-female sexual bonding, and that while the homosexual is every bit as lovable as the heterosexual, homosexual sex is not what we wish for our children. And not because there exists social discrimination against gays, but because we truly want our children to love a member of the opposite sex and to sexually bond with that person.

It is almost impossible for heterosexual liberals, who have redefined tolerance to mean acceptance, to admit all this, but the Twins game made it abundantly clear. That is why the kiss cam at the Minneapolis Metrodome will only show heterosexual kissers for the foreseeable future, even as most Minneapolis liberals, like liberals all over America, continue to defame the Boy Scouts and anyone else who holds the same ideal for their children that these liberals hold for theirs.