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Journalist Alex Lee asked Strickland a couple of reasonable questions about LGBTQ inclusion. Strickland went scorched-earth.
Sean Strickland, the current UFC Middleweight Champion, on Wednesday shared some of the most homophobic and anti-LGBTQ views ever expressed by a professional athlete.
Strickland is in Toronto ahead of UFC 297. He was asked by MMA journalist Alex Lee, a Toronto resident and writer at Outsports’ sister site MMA Fighting, about the fighter’s previous statements rejecting a potential son who might come out as gay.
Strickland started his response by asking Lee if he had voted for current Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“I’m not going to say,” Lee correctly responded.
After then calling Lee “the enemy,” Strickland asked Lee if he was gay. Lee is not gay.
“If you had a son and he was like, yeah man, you don’t want a grandkid?” Strickland asked Lee.
When Lee said he wouldn’t “have a problem with it,” Strickland launched a personal attack on the journalist:
“You’re part of the problem,” Strickland told Lee, before telling him “Go f**k yourself.”
The question about having a gay son comes from previous awful comments Strickland said about the idea of his son coming out as gay.
Lee pressed on, asking Strickland more questions about his thoughts on the LGBTQ community.
Strickland the called Lee an “infection” and “everything that is wrong with the world.”
These are horrific comments, rarely heard directed at a journalist
“I come from a city that has a very strong LGBTQ community,” Lee told Outsports after the encounter with Strickland. “I’ve never been comfortable with a lot of fighters’ stances on LGBTQ issues, and he’s been worse than most. I felt it was my responsibility to communities in the city of Toronto to ask these questions.”
UFC has various publicly out gay and lesbian athletes. It will be interesting to watch the response UFC has, given the horrific anti-gay position Strickland again espoused.
