Oh, Running Press. This is not your best effort.
For those of you who remember last week's outrage with editor Trisha Telep rejecting author Jessica Verday's short story on the basis that the G-rated YA story she'd written involved a homosexual relationship, publisher Running Press finally made their statement on the situation today. Their respone is basically to blame the victim, vilifying Verday as much as they possibly can. There are, however, some insightful and beautifully worded responses to the statement, people more than willing to point out the ridiculous spin being attempted here. Also, a "we're not bigoted because some of the people we know and care about are gays" does not fly as an excuse when you're clearly keeping company with bigoted people. If the issue was really as important to Running Press as they'd like us to believe, they'd be spending less time making terrible excuses and more time trying to fix the problem. Backing Telep and trying to vilify Verday is not the smartest choice they could have made.