“I used a poor choice of word that doesn’t reflect who I am or what I believe. I did not intend to single out any individual or group.”

Different beliefs today

Why were those tweets still there. Believe what YOU want, I will believe what I want. Nuff said.

you did too. You just didn't have twitter around to capture them for posterity.

Prejudice is rooted in fear. If a child is raised to fear gay people they will. As they mature and actually meet and get to know some gay people, that fear and prejudice usually disappears. It's one of the reasons young people are less into organized religion than older generations. They no longer buy into the whole gay = evil bullshit.

after they've become adults?

Because that's a little bit silly.

When he grew up.

Is the "q" word now like the "n-word" where it can only be used by the demographic segment it pertains to?

33 cents a day.

I don't know the answer to your question.

Straight folks should never use "queer" in that casual way that black folks use the nword. I'm a gay woman, and I would consider it very offensive.

He said the opposite of that.

I know it isn't easy and we're all jaded because of the trump cabal's nonstop lies but I'm willing to believe this fellow. As to him not deleting the tweets until recently how often do you go back through all of your social media to check if you've said dumb things years previously? As a child of the 80's who grew up in a fairly rural 100% white area, it took me years to break myself from saying "that's gay" about something I felt was stupid or didn't like. It's not that I hated gays or even disliked them,and I had experimental bisexual experiences like many people and wasn't ashamed of it-not that I broadcast that either- it was simply something I had heard so much it became part of the vernacular and only later did I "get woke" enough to realize that words had that kind of power to hurt somebody. I suspect this fellows use of "queer" is much the same. It's a slang word that has become a generic insult more than an actual attitude about gays, especially among younger people who may not put as much forethought into their words as adults do. Now he's been informed, deleted the tweets, apologized and will hopefully put more care into his future comments. Everybody grows up and it sounds like he has.

I have edited this comment to add that almost everybody grows up. The man-baby in the White House has obviously not grown up because he's been coddled like an infant with Fort Knox at his disposal from birth. If he was confronted with such tweets he made years previously he'd deny he made them even when presented with evidence, call the people who found them "witch hunters", insult their gender, appearance, race, religion and personal wealth, call them schoolyard names- the standard trump dump, but the one thing he would NOT do is take responsibility and apologize. I doubt he'd even delete the tweets.

And during the Gulf War in 1991 (when I was 22), I wrote some ugly racist things about Muslims in letters to my father.

I feel terrible that I ever felt that way.

I found some of the things I saw in Saudi Arabia to be very intriguing. So I read a lot of books about Islam, and my admiration for the faith and the vast majority of its followers grew by leaps and bounds. Every chance I had to talk with a Muslim about their faith, I made the best of. It changed my views substantially.

Thank you for sharing that.

I AM actually a big old homo.

Seriously, are we really going to excoriate people for what they say as teenagers? There is no more vicious time in life than junior high and high school. Kids are horrible to one another. It is still not okay to be gay in most places and this guy grew up in TX. One of the most "not-okay-to-be-gay" places in the US. I'm not going to condemn him for trying to fit in.

Apology accepted Kyler.

Thank you for this thoughtful, knowledgeable, and decent response.

I cheered in 2004 when Bush beat Kerry.

Now, in my thirties, I’m completely anti-war and am transgender. lol

PS - My favorite word used to be the “F” word. I’m glad social media wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I hate that person (me at 15). Older me got my revenge, though. :-P

While they should be corrected for it at the time, going back and punishing them for that stuff is not useful.

If he was still tweeting offensive things, that's different.

I was calling out Marilyn Musgrave when I was a teen.

That's what I used to call her back then. Even though I didn't live in her district. I'm district 1. So my reps, no problem. Loved Schroeder and now DeGette.

Male brains don't really gel until they approach 24-26. We can talk them into doing stupid things too. I'll cut him some slack for being an idiot at 15, because he probably really was.

We'll see.

"that's so gay" "you're so gay"
everything was "gay" when my kid was in jr. high and high school.
and i have gay friends. she knows them. she knew them back then and liked them.
and *she* had gay friends!

it drove me fucking crazy.

you tell them a hundred times to knock it off, you tell them over and over again why they should knock it off.

it didn't matter. they all used the "gay" expression as if their brains couldn't draw a correlation from the phrase to people or friends who were gay.

and what they actually meant was: "that's so lame" "you're so weird/stupid/crazy/funny" but for years it came out as "gay"

glad that phase eventually passed