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Ezra Klein: Give Ambrosino a chance

Ezra Klein is standing by Brandon Ambrosino, a recent hire to Vox who has earned the ire of progressives and the gay community, who characterize him as an apologist for homophobia.

"I could’ve, and should’ve, handled this hire a lot better. But I would ask people to give Brandon a chance," Klein wrote at the end of a long Facebook post on Friday. "He’ll be held to the same high standards as all Vox.com employees, and I believe he’ll meet them."

The backlash to Abrosino's hire, from liberal sites like Media Matters and America Blog, began almost immediately after he was hired. Those sites and others fault Ambrosino, a gay Christian, for believing that someone who is anti-same sex marriage is not automatically homophobic, that being gay is a choice, that people shouldn't have immediately dismissed "Duck Dynasty" star Phil Robertson for his anti-gay remarks and for expressing warm feelings toward Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell, despite his vehement disapproval of gays.

"Ambrosino offers the anti-LGBT right the reassuring message that they aren't doing anything wrong," and gives "anti-gay conservatives ... a gay writer they can hide behind to shield themselves from accusations of bigotry," Media Matters wrote. Slate's Mark Joseph Stern went even further, bashing Ambrosino's writing and saying that his "sole aim seems to be to inform conservatives that their worst fears about gay people are absolutely correct."

In his initial response, Klein said he was "mystified by the blowback" and asked for more time to understand and consider the issue. Since then, Klein says he's spoken to "a lot folks in the LGBT community to better understand the strong, negative reaction" to Ambrosino's hiring.

"People felt Brandon had made his name writing sloppy pieces that were empathetic towards homophobes but relentlessly critical of the gay community. They believe we were sending a signal about Vox’s approach to LGBT issues: contrarian clickbait at the expense of the struggle and discrimination that LGBT men and women face every day," Klein wrote in Friday's post.

"That was never our intention. Our approach to LGBT stories will be the same as our approach to all other issues: We want people to read us because we do the best job tracking and explaining the news, not because we do the best job shocking people. We want to inform our readers — not annoy them," he wrote. "Our kind of clickbait tends towards beautiful data visualizations, not frontal assaults on causes we believe in and people we admire."