Toby Keith isn't a homophobe?

Toby Keith prepares for a tornado in Trailerhood

AKSARBENT has always had a love-him-hate-him view of Toby Keith.

On the one hand:
He's a jingoistic, manipulative war monger and we're glad that his box-the-camera Ford Truck ads are off the air. We'd much rather watch San Francisco resident Mike Rowe pitch Fords. We're also glad that the more judicious powers in country music didn't subscribe to Keith's fatwah against the Dixie Chicks. (CMT used to play Keith/Dixie Chicks videos back to back — Snort!)

Big Blue Note

On the other hand:
Keith is a clever, talented artist with a great voice (and even better management) who apparently is sexually sophisticated enough to regard teh gay as a nonissue, as CMT revealed today via (for us) Towleroad. (AKSARBENT will try to resist the snarky observance that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones and that people with lips as large as Keith's should never belittle dudes who... oh never mind.)

From the interview — Keith's sensible, practical assessment of gay marriage (probably a more persuasive argument to Joe Sixpack than 80% of what gay rights organizations say):

"First of all, we're going to stop somebody from getting a marriage license because they're gay? You won't stop them from living together, so what have you accomplished? ... Wasting a lot of money here and a lot of time that could be spent working on this deficit that we're under ... I never saw the reasoning behind getting in people's personal lives."

As CMT's interview shows, Keith is NOT sophisticated enough to have overcome his dumb sexism regarding women in combat; apparently he thinks that warfare today is like a wrestling match in which the physical size advantage of males means something.

Closer to homo, AKSARBENT has a problem with the tragic fact that evidently, except for a brief anomaly in As Good As I Once Was, no males better looking than Keith are ever cast in his videos. What's up with that?

Anyway, AKSARBENT has always liked two of his songs, the first of which shows his versatile ability to work the Kenny Chesney / Jimmy Buffett side of the street at least as well as they do and the second of which demonstrates how cleverness of execution (Thank you, director Michael Salomon!) can overcome even the most cynical of demographically-driven Nashville product.