Manny Pacquiao's Gay Marriage Stance Gets Twisted, Invokes Outrage, Receives Mayweather Response

I'll admit that I've mostly tried to avoid writing about this, but everyone's talking about it, so I kind of have to. Manny Pacquiao -- well, sort of Manny Pacquiao -- invoked a pretty big outrage from a lot of folks for a hard-line stance he supposedly took on gay marriage. In an article I'm not going to link because I'm not into giving extra penny clicks to dangerously irresponsible stuff like this, Pacquiao was asked about his stance on gay marriage, or gays in general or whatever (I'm not reading it again -- oh no, now I'M being "irresponsible"), and needless to say, it wasn't kind.

What made it really bad was that the author quoted Leviticus, which was then picked up as Pacquiao quoting Leviticus, spawning hundreds of internet articles slamming Pacquiao, or leading to readers condemning Pacquiao's quotes.

Then it turned out Pacquiao never quoted Leviticus, never said gays should be put to death, never really said much at all that we in the States don't hear from at least half of our own politicians and their followers, which wasn't exactly easy to make out when reading the original article. The original author then typed up another piece, in which he accepted no responsibility and simply blamed "biased" writers for mangling his sloppy mess of an article. More attention for him. Yaaay.

Pacquiao responded to the whole mess with this:

"I am not angry with gays but I don't want them to sin against the law of God because homesexual offenders cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. I was talking about same sex marriages. ... I am not against gays and I have relatives who are gay. There is nothing we can do about having such relatives but what I don't want is for them to disobey what God has ordered."

I have no interest in getting into this debate here, so the comments for this post won't even be open, and if you start a FanPost or the like I'll just delete it -- I'm just not into having the debate on this site. Take it somewhere else.

I do think it's important that even if you still disagree with Pacquiao's stance, and frankly I do, it must be noted that the things he was widely criticized for saying, he didn't say. And that's not just from Pacquiao, it's from the original author in question.

Never one to let a moment go by without jumping on, Floyd Mayweather took to Twitter today to post this:

"I stand behind President Obama & support gay marriage. I'm an American citizen & I believe people should live their life the way they want."

We have Manny Pacquiao being wildly misquoted and relentlessly slammed for things he didn't say, which cannot go away, no matter how many people post things like this noting the inaccuracies of what was widely reported at first. You can't un-ring that bell. It's over and done with. Pacquiao's reputation took a hit, and maybe it would have anyway, but if he weren't misquoted as saying that gays should be killed, it probably wouldn't be so bad a hit as it is now.

Then Mayweather jumps on to play "Born in the USA" over a loudspeaker on Twitter, still not understand the song same as he didn't when he used it for entrance music against Ricky Hatton, to say he supports gay marriage and that RIGHT HERE in AMERICA, we do what we WANT. This from the guy who had a fit when it turned out Miguel Cotto sleeps in the same bed as his buddy Bryan, and called his own father a "faggot" on 24/7 in front of the world last year. A real progressive, that Floyd Mayweather.

In short, this is probably the most obnoxious conversation there will be in the boxing world all year.