At this time last year, the media was obsessed with Pride’s screening process for workers and volunteers at the Pride festival. How will the gay community respond to reports that several workers are registered sex offenders?

Talk radio made it the topic of the day: “The homosexuals have perverts working their festival. Our children are at risk.” In response, there was a community forum that attracted approximately 600 people, there were editorials in this paper about how the Pride board failed to screen people and there were politicians who refused to march in the Pride parade.

The problem was that the men involved in the controversy were not prevented by law from working with Pride because, among other things, they would not be in a private setting with an unsupervised child.

At the time of the controversy, I wondered what would happen if the ex-gay/ex-burglar who started this had done background checks of workers for the San Diego County Fair. He didn’t. I guess he only cares about the two dozen or so kids who attend Pride and who could get molested by homosexuals. Apparently he doesn’t care about the 100,000 kids who go to the fair and could be molested there by some child-molesting fugitive.

Thankfully, D.A. Bonnie Dumanis and her fugitive task force do care. Sheriff’s deputies arrested three San Diego fair employees on outstanding warrants after a fugitive task force ran checks on all 350 employees at this year’s fair.

Authorities found that 10 workers were wanted on felony crimes, but seven of them were not at the fair at the time of the sweep.

When the news broke earlier this month (before the close of the fair), I fully expected to see the mainstream media make this a major story. Perhaps an editorial in the paper, some follow-up stories on how people with outstanding felony warrants can get jobs working for the County Fair.

My cynical side thought this paper would editorialize and call for the resignations of the San Diego County Fair board of directors. How could they have such negligent screening procedures so that 10 workers got hired who have outstanding felony warrants? Some warrants could be for child molestation, domestic violence, perhaps even murder.

I expected to see Mayor Sanders refuse to attend the fair in protest of the shoddy screening procedures. Would Supervisor Jacobs refuse to judge the dill pickle contest?

Where was the community forum? Where was the outrage in the gay community? Nowhere, as far as I could see.

And, quite frankly, there should have been. And not just to emphasize the hypocrisy and the double-standard charge, but to point out that it took a lesbian D.A. to make parents aware that they have more to worry about when their kids go to a “straight” fair than a gay one.

The truth is that despite its “family friendly” ads, the County Fair is much more dangerous than the Pride festival. Off-duty police don’t feel free to go unarmed (they’ve litigated for the right to bring their weapons) and local gangs don’t declare a truce (in years past, the fair has been the staging ground for serious assaults).

Why, then, the fuss about Pride last year? It’s because some folks still believe that homosexuals molest kids, recruit them into the gay world and if we adopt them, foster them or – heaven forbid – have them biologically, they will grow up gay or lesbian and suffer.

All the data shows the opposite, but who pays attention to facts. Well, we hope the courts will.

The Arkansas Supreme Court got it right a few weeks ago when it struck down its state’s policy against gays and lesbians fostering children. It discounted every negative stereotype the state put forth to deny gays and lesbians the right to care for foster children.

But the New York Court of Appeals got it wrong when it ruled that New York had a rational reason to discriminate against same-sex couples. It’s because such couples aren’t “ideal” parents.

Luckily, the New York decision will have no bearing on how the California Supreme Court will rule. The California Court of Appeal is expected to uphold a lower court ruling that preventing same-sex marriages violates the California Constitution. I’ve predicted here that California Supreme Court will reach the same result.