New York- The head of a conservative lobbying group complained Wednesday that Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin faked an interview and made up quotes attributed to him in his column Wednesday.
“I have never met Jimmy Breslin, never had the conversation described in his column today and never said those sentences in my life,” the Rev. Louis Sheldon, chairman of the Traditional Values Coalition, said in a statement.
In the column, Breslin wrote: ” ‘Homosexuals are dangerous,’ Sheldon assured me one day… ‘They proselytize. They come to the door, and if your son answers and nobody is there to stop it, they grab the son and run off with him. They steal him. They take him away and turn him into a homosexual.'”
Sheldon accused Breslin of “making up quotes out of whole cloth.”
“In this column, Breslin looks brilliant and he is right — mouthing the lines he puts in my mouth, I do sound like a ‘fruitcake,'” Sheldon added.
Breslin denied that he faked the quotes from Sheldon and said they came from a 1992 interview he had with Sheldon at the Republican National Convention in Houston.
Sheldon told The Associated Press that he was at the convention but did not recall talking to Breslin.
“I was there and wrote about it, and he was there and read about it the next day,” Breslin said. “He never said a thing until now. How can he say he wasn’t there? The guy has talked about homosexuals for 50 years. He has very little credence.”
The quotes in Wednesday’s column did not appear in the Aug. 18, 1992 column.
In the 1992 column, Breslin called Sheldon “the little minister” and quoted him about homosexuality and pornography.
“Pornography leads to everything bad,” he quoted Sheldon as saying. Breslin also said Sheldon told him: “We stand for the heterosexual ethic, and not promoting homosexuality.”
Newsday’s New York editor, Les Payne, said Breslin should have made it clear in Wednesday’s column that the quotes he attributed to Sheldon came from a 1992 interview. “Our readers should have been let in on the time frame,” Payne said.