Fox Sports Is Going A Little Overboard With This Censorship Thing

Fox Sports says no to Gay(s)... Rudy Gay...s.
Bored to tears and mildly hungover this morning, I spent my first few hours of today perusing anything on the interwebs that would distract me from my unquenchable thirst and the clock on my computer that I swear is counting time backwards. During this quest to find the end of the internet, I stopped at the MSN / FoxSports website and found myself reading a piece by Jordan Schultz about the studs and not-so studs of the summer NBA Bball camp ("cleverly" entitled "Musts and Busts." Must what? Must see? Must play better? Must have? If so, "must have" what? Just because it rhymes doesn't mean it works.). Despite the fact that I really don't give half a shit about the NBA, things were going pretty well and I found it all mildly interesting. But then I got a little distracted by this:

The lightning quick Conley possesses a great understanding of the game and will fit in perfectly with running mates Hakim Warrick and Rudy BLEEP, as well as be a very formidable pick and roll combo with Pau Gasol. Conley will be an All-Star point guard for years to come.

Rudy BLEEP? And the word "BLEEP" was hyperlinked (does anyone really use this word anymore? Has "hyperlinked" jumped the proverbial internet vernacular shark?) to this:

FOXSports.com encourages our users to express themselves on their blogs, story comments, or message boards. We don't want to slow down your game when you're dishing on your favorite teams and players.

At the same time, we recognize that not everyone out there loves a potty mouth. So if there's an obvious bad word on a blog, story comment, or message board post, we'll try to censor it.

Feeling brave, mature, and adult-ish? Or just want to get in touch with your inner sailor? You can choose to have FOX Sports do nothing, and leave all those R-rated words alone. If you do, you may see some coarse language from time to time in the community. Don't say we didn't warn you!

This was the following questions:

Would you like FOXSports.com to automatically censor content you view?

And then you choose whether or not you wish your content to be censored or not (you choose "No, Don't Censor" if you wish to summon your "inner sailor"). So because Rudy BLEEP's last name is "Gay," Fox censored it. Apparently the word "gay" is "an obvious bad word." Now aside from the fact that this site is run by Fox and to the editors the word "gay" is likely as "obviously bad" as say "fuckstick," I can sort of see why they've chosen to censor the word gay as it can be used in a derogatory name-calling connotation (i.e. Johnny Damon throws like a gay; or Peyton Manning and Kenny Chesney get gay together). But do you think maybe you've gone too far when you can't print a person's proper name? Hasn't Rudy Gay suffered enough with his alopecia and the fact that he was likely teased his entire childhood because of his name? And now he is forced to endure the fact that adults have concluded that his name is offensive enough to require censorship. That seems a little unnecessary. In Fox Sports land, Chien-Ming Wang's name comes up as Chien-Ming BLEEP for F's sake! I mean, it's not fair that when I am searching for an article about Randall Gay it comes up Randall BLEEP. Or if I'd like to see what people are saying about Dick Jauron you find yourself reading about BLEEP Jauron. It's just so stupid and seems so easy to fix. I'm hoping they address this soon because I the next time I read an article about BLEEP BLEEP when clearly I was looking for some information about Lucious Pusey, I am going to f'n lose it.