Dan Savage apologized yesterday for referring to Christians who walked out on his speech as "pansy ass," but stood by the Bible-bashing comments that sparked the walkout to begin with. "We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people," Savage said during a keynote at the National High School Journalism Convention, according to Gawker. He described the Bible as a "radically pro-slavery document," that was chock full of passages that modern readers ignore. When students walked out Savage said, "It's funny to someone who is on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible how pansy-ass people react when you push back."
Savage's speech was about the bullying homosexuals face. But conservative groups like CitizenLink argued that deriding the Bible and mocking the walkout was itself "obviously a form of bullying." Savage agreed in part on his blog yesterday. "My use of 'pansy-assed' was insulting, it was name-calling, and it was wrong," he wrote. But he stood by the Bible comments. "I didn't call anyone's religion bullshit. I did say there is bullshit—'untrue words or ideas'—in the Bible. That is being spun as an attack on Christianity. Which is Bullshhh… which is untrue." (More Dan Savage stories.)