“Shut up,” Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colorado) told his colleague at a July 18 meeting of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“You think you are big enough to make me, you little wimp?” challenged Rep. Pete Stark (D-California). “Come on. Come over here and make me. I dare you — you little fruitcake, you little fruitcake. I said you are a fruitcake.”

According to reports from Fox News, some Republican sources also claimed that Stark fired a vulgar, anti-gay remark at Thomas during the melee, the second half of which contains the word “sucker.”

According to Fox News, Stark has a history of such unsavory asides, and once called Republican Rep. Nancy Johnson “a whore,” and Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan “a disgrace to his race.”

“I trust that you would understand that if a Republican said that, there would be a public lynching,” said Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida), whose own sexual orientation has been called into question in recent months.

Stark attempted to downplay the intent of his fruitcake comment.

“Fruitcake means inept, crazy, a nut-cake to me,” explained Stark.

Both the Human Rights Campaign and Log Cabin Republicans were distressed by the general tenor of the exchange but neither sought to label it as gay in content. The incident was triggered by committee chair Bill Thomas (R-California) trying to ram pension legislation through that body, over the objections of Democrats. Capitol Police were called as the incident escalated. On July 23, Rep. Thomas took the floor of the House to apologize for his actions, breaking into tears during the process. The apology helped to clear the air, but Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) remained skeptical.

Rep. Stark remained his combative and officially unapologetic self.

The procedural disagreement over the pension bill began as a fairly harmless disagreement. Some Democrats complained that they were not given enough time to review a substitute bill by the Republican majority. After the majority of the Democrats moved to a library to continue discussing their strategy, they ended up demanding that the Republicans read the bill through line by line. At this point Thomas instructed the Capitol Police to eject the Democrats from the library, Republicans claiming the Democrats had no right to be in the library. Thomas eventually denied the reading of the bill and the legislation was passed without any Democratic votes.

Some say the ensuing fracas underscores how rapidly relations between Democrats and Republicans have deteriorated in the past few months.