Hug Your Sons, Dads
“I Miss Big, Wet, Embarrassing Kisses From My Father,” John DeVore wrote yesterday on his Medium site, Humungus.
It was a one-day-later reflection on a truly awful tweet—one that is (thankfully) already fading into the morass of toxicity that this election cycle has unleashed. John Cardillo, a right-wing pundit, captioned a photo of Joe Biden hugging his son with the question: “Does this look like an appropriate father/son interaction to you?”
“The message is both muddy and crystal clear,” DeVore writes:
Cardillo is plainly suggesting there is something… off… about these two men. He’s also mumbling another message under his breath: love is weakness.
I like to think of myself as a dirtbag sommelier so I also detected notes of homophobia in Cardillo’s obnoxious little one-liner. He’s singing a sad jingle to the macho faithful: any physical affection between men is… gay.
This is a bad thing, of course. To be gay. To love who you love.
This idea is brutally harmful, especially to those who espouse it. As the author and…
