I almost forgot about this screengrab that I captured off ESPN.com. The headline: “Gay breaks 44-year-old mark in straight 200m.” An amazing feat, no doubt. But the reason it caught my attention had little to do with the athletic accomplishment; it was that it reminded me of the surname swap from the ultra-conservative American Family Association’s news site.
In that story, from 2008, the AFA’s news site automatically swapped the word homosexual for gay in a story about Tyson Gay, leaving us with this headline: “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.”