The Register-Guard - Eugene,Oregon,USA
http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/02/20/ed.edit.gayban.0220.html

February 20, 2005

They can't be serious: Feds order change to title of suicide workshop
A Register-Guard Editorial
They can't be serious. They're just gaming the system, goading their
critics to rise to the bait.

"Watch this," they chuckle. "They'll go nuts!"

And so these federal bureaucrats announce with a fiendishly straight
face that they won't allow the words "gay," "lesbian," "bisexual"
and "transgender" to appear in the title of a suicide prevention
workshop presentation scheduled for Feb. 28 in Portland.

They had to make it look legitimate or the joke wouldn't fly. So the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a real
federal agency with a $3.2 billion budget, ordered changes to the
title of the talk "Suicide Prevention Among
Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Individuals."

"What kind of changes?" asked an incredulous Ron Bloodworth, a former
coordinator of youth suicide prevention for Oregon and one of three
specialists leading the session.

"Just to the words that come after 'among' and
before 'individuals,' " was the response.

They can't be serious, Bloodworth thought.

"You wouldn't want to jeopardize your funding in a silly little tiff
over four words, would you?" came the response from the feds.

No, Bloodworth clearly understood the threat. He changed the workshop
title to "Suicide Prevention in Vulnerable Populations."

Much better, the bureaucrats beamed.

But they can't really be serious, otherwise the head of the federal
Cartoon Show Song Administration would have to order changes to the
last line of the Flintstones theme ("we'll have a gay old time"). And
history texts would have to be edited to prevent vulnerable
populations from being exposed to the name of the plane that dropped
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima ("Enola Gay"). What about Marvin Gaye?
Perhaps the "e" on the end makes it OK.

So they can't really be serious. Can they?