Big con job makes Bill McCollum's anti-gay bias even worse

Let's get the nastiness out of the way first with a slug to Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum for using your money to hire an alleged family-values expert who was recently caught with a gay hooker.

You may know some of this sordid story. But you don't know it all — including the con job McCollum's been trying to pull to cover his tracks.

The short version is that the "expert" McCollum hired to help him fight gay adoption has been exposed as a fraud.

First, Dr. George Rekers' "expertise" was essentially dismissed as junk science by the courts. Then, Rekers' anti-gay credentials were called into question after he was caught traveling with a gay hooker who advertised his services on a porn site. (Rekers said he hired "Lucien" simply "to lift luggage" … insisting that wasn't a euphemism.)

McCollum tried a number of lame defenses.

First, he tried to blame the Department of Children and Families for hiring Rekers … until DCF unearthed a memo where McCollum personally pleaded to pay Rekers $60,000. (At $300-an-hour, the fee later doubled. Quite the fiscal watchdog, our Bill.)

But McCollum's second defense was even more devious.

Faced with mounting criticism about why he would try to tear a happy family apart in the first place, McCollum tried to con people into believing he didn't want to … that he was merely doing his job.

McCollum tried to take my fellow columnist, Mike Thomas, for a ride on this one. After Mike asked McCollum whether he personally supported the ban on gay adoption, McCollum batted his eyes and said he had a gay staffer who had adopted children in another state.

"Lets leave it at that," McCollum then said.

This was supposed to be McCollum's little wink and nod to the liberal media — not to mention the majority of Americans who oppose Florida's outdated law — that he's really on their side.

Horse hockey.

Two years ago, when McCollum was addressing Republicans in Indian River County, he promised to fight as hard as he could to keep gays from ever adopting children in this state. "We're going to go to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals and we're going to argue their socks off," he said to a round of applause, according to thePress Journal of Vero Beach. "We happen to believe in this party that this state law is the right law."

This is also a guy who tried to ban gay adoption in Congress — and one of the few congressmen in all of America to oppose Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday.

Quite the civil-rights champion, our Bill.

Come on, Bill. Man up to your discrimination. Own it.

You can try telling your different stories to different crowds all you want. But the truth is: You're at the forefront of discrimination in this country.

You're helping lead the fight to keep innocent children away from loving parents. And you wasted more money than most Floridians make in two years paying off a discredited hack who peddles in bigotry.

That's the truth. And no amount of winks, nods or malarkey-filled insinuations will change that.