No, it’s not what you’re thinking. They didn’t ban gay people. They banned “The Gays.” That is, people with the last name “Gay.”
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian version of Facebook (the social networking website) rejects membership for anyone with the last name “Gay.” The paper reports that any attempt to register a Facebook membership under the last name “Gay” results in the following error message:
“Please enter a legitimate name.”
Ouch! As if the inevitable playground taunts weren’t bad enough for children with that last name, now this.
Clearly, Facebook isn’t trying to discriminate against The Gays. The problem is no doubt the result of some oversensitive software filters. I’m sure Rudolf Lipschitz would have faced a similar challenge had he survived long enough to create a Facebook profile.
On the other hand, why is “gay” on the list of terms that are filtered out? I’ve made the point before, but the word “gay” is not a profane term. It doesn’t need filtering.
You would have thought that the software filter gurus would have learned this lesson after the “Enola Homosexual” incident. This incident occurred on September 5, 1994, when the Northwest Herald (a paper in suburban Chicago) ran a story with the following headline:
“ATOMIC BOMBERS CRITICIZE ENOLA HOMOSEXUAL EXHIBIT”
This nonsensical headline resulted when the word “gay” was mistakenly replaced with “homosexual.” The Northwest Herald’s story was actually about a planned exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, where part of the fuselage of the famous plane the Enola Gay was to be placed on display. For younger readers, the Enola Gay — not the Enola Homosexual — is famous for being the B-29 bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare, over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945.
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Training material for newspaper editors and Facebook IT employees:
How to tell when “gay” means “homosexual”
Example 1: “Gay” doesn’t mean “homosexual”
