Facebook comments are in the news again. We in Bozeman have a history with Facebook controversy, you know, so it’s nature we’d have an interest in the latest online comments to get people in hot water.
A Republican candidate for state legislature, Jason Priest, apologized recently for comments he made on Facebook. From the Gazette’s coverage:
In the back and forth of a discussion about the federal stimulus spending and economist John Maynard Keynes, Priest referred to Keynes as a “big homo†and suggested that President Barack Obama was figuratively, painfully sodomizing America with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Making a bigger splash is Tim Ravndal, the former president of the Big Sky Tea Party Association in Montana. Ravndal, in a comment beneath a story about an ACLU lawsuit over rights for same-sex couples, appeared to endorse violence against gays similar to that perpetrated against Matthew Shepard.
Shepard was a University of Wyoming student who, in 1998, was beaten and tied to a fence post because he was gay.
Read the full Facebook exchange on John S. Adam’s political blog from the Great Falls Tribune.
On his Facebook profile, Ravndal said this by way of apology:
In sharing news about ACLU suing Montana on the gay marriage issue, I made a mistake and commented on a post that implied that I condone violence against another human being. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those that know me understand and that is all that matters!
As of the time I wrote this, there were 321 comments beneath that post on Ravndal’s profile. Good reading.
You can read the exchange in the photo at the top of this story. Read the full story on the Chronicle’s website.