The View's Jenny McCarthy says "shame on me" for parroting a lesbian rumor often spread by the ring-wing to discredit Hillary Clinton.
McCarthy
was talking about a new Bill and Hillary Clinton biography and said, "Well, maybe he has his girlfriends and she has her girlfriends, you never know.... Maybe they have an arrangement."
She was just trying to get a laugh, McCarthy said Friday in
a guest post for the
Chicago Sun-Times.
"Over the last year, my goal has been to always be funny with a side of inspiration," wrote the host, who is finishing her contract with the show, "yet I have found myself being molded to be something I'm not. I don't feel good about gossiping. I'm not even good at it, but when I started at The View, I knew I had a job that required some of it."
McCarthy explained that jokes felt safer to her than wild speculation.
"Truthfully, my stomach would turn worrying that the information I was presenting might not be accurate," she wrote. "There have been so many inaccurate stories about me and it made me nauseous to think that I could be igniting a shitstorm that was not true in someone else's life. So, I turned to jokes most of the time. To me, jokes seemed far less harmful."
After the Clinton joke, McCarthy said she felt like she'd gone too far.
"That night, as I lay in bed and reflected on my day, I realized I was a hypocrite," she wrote. "How could I make a joke like that and then five minutes later preach about female empowerment? It makes me sad when I see women ripping on other women, and there I was making a joke about our possible first female president!"
McCarthy had inadvertently joined the ranks of conservative commentator Glenn Beck and Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a "hate group." Beck
laughed it up back in April, kidding that Hillary Clinton had come out and "will be having sex with a woman on the White House desk if it becomes popular." He was supposedly just joking, too. Before that, Fischer
derided her as possibly the "first lesbian president."
