Search Results for: grant ryan

He once had a war of words with Gore Vidal (whom he addressed as “you queer” after Vidal called him a “pro-war-crypto-Nazi”) and he made such condescending remarks about gay rights as, “A homosexual has a right not to get hit by a truck.”  Yes, William F. Buckley Jr., that great charmer of men and founder of conservative soapbox The National Review, is finally dead.  After graduating Yale in 1950, Buckley rose to right-wing fame after penning the book God and Man at Yale, in which he went after the growing threat of “liberal professors” who were forcing their heathen views on unsuspecting students.  He may be responsible, in fact, for popularizing the term “liberal professor” and for turning the American Right into a bunch of anti-intellectual, academia-hating Texans.  More recently he has weighed in on the illogic of the Episcopal Church in trying to canonize homosexuals and spoken in support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  He leaves a great legacy of tight-assed stubbornness behind him, and his influence will probably still be felt for years to come.