NFLSports & Politics

Jersey Politician Apologizes For Facebook Message Calling The Philadelphia Eagles “Gaybirds”

One of the great things about sports, maybe the best, is the way it allows people of different backgrounds – people who’ve never met in their lives – to connect over a shared experience. It can be an especially useful tool for politicians – let’s face it, they’ll never actually meet most of their constituents, so they can at least express an affinity for [local team] and hope it resonates with voters.

Maybe that’s what Charles Mainor, a New Jersey assemblyman from Jersey City, was going for. Mainor’s a Giants fan. He posted a message to his Facebook wall on Sunday, apparently (and understandably) fired up over the game that had just taken place. It began:

We are not going to just lay down, we come to play.

Good start. Giants fans will eat it up. Non-Giants fans should still appreciate Mainor’s passion for his team. But the message continued:

Who the hell do you think we are the DALLAS COWGIRLS OR THOSE GAYBIRDS FROM PHILLY…NO WE ARE THE NEW YORK GIANTS.

Bad finish. The Jersey Journal, the local newspaper for Hudson County, where Jersey City is located, reported that they’d “received at least one phone call” complaining about the message, which sent Mainor into damage control mode. His reasoning:

Mainor was in Jersey City last night at a party to watch the Giants play the Green Bay Packers when he posted almost the entire above message on his Facebook page, he said. A friend of his sat at the computer and added the comment about the “gaybirds from Philly,” Mainor said.

Mainor might need some new friends. Well, that or some new excuses. (He did, in fairness, say that he has to “take full responsibility because it was under my name.”) Because while impassioned remarks about your team are fine, impassioned remarks about your team that also reek of homophobia and generally sound like they come from the FriendFromHS Twitter account are…not so fine. Oh, and Mainor broke out a classic when defending himself from the “Gaybirds” backlash:

“I have very, very close relatives who are gay.”

Well, at least Mainor can console himself with this: compared with some other high-profile scandals in New Jersey politics, this is nothing.

[Deadspin, photo of Facebook massage via]