lot of people were critical of him for switching his political allegiance from Democrat to GOP when Nixon was elected and being such a god friend of that crook Spiro Agnew.

You should have replied to "tmaj48".
He's the one who brought up the joke you're referring to.
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you doyou are misinformedMark Twain

Bob Hope shouldn't have told that "joke" but he apologized after and recorded a public service announcement condemning homophobia, it's on YouTube.
Here it is. Hope recorded this message in 1988.
Hope has been accused of many things which have no basis including homophobia and racism. Hope escorted Judy Garland to a club in Los Angeles to hear Billie Holiday sing. Holiday was taunted by racist remarks from one customer until Hope badgered the heckler until he left.
My feeling about Hope's joke was that it was a joke. Some of us can joke about things we don't believe in. Sometimes jokes don't come off they way you want them to.

Sorry there's no pill for you to take for that.
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you doyou are misinformedMark Twain

I'm a liberal for the record.

So true. He sounds like a miserable liberal ayhole (but then aren't they all?).
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you doyou are misinformedMark Twain

American's don't need to be granted "special permission" to travel outside their country, this isn't North Korea.
Ronald Reagan personally called the President of France to check on his friend Rock Hudson and ask that he receive the best medical care available.
Bob Hope shouldn't have told that "joke" but he apologized after and recorded a public service announcement condemning homophobia, it's on YouTube.
You lost all moral authority to judge Hope, with your disgusting attack on both the Reagan's, it was every bit as appalling as Hope's "joke."
Those "tedious" (as you call them) Christmas shows where beloved by the troops and the 1971 television special, remains one of the most watched TV shows in US history, with almost 40 000 000 viewers, which in 1971 was an astronomical number.
I'm reporting your post for the appalling comments you made about Nancy Reagan.2000

Must have been a really funny joke.
What was it?
If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you doyou are misinformedMark Twain

Sure, lots of people made gay jokes back in the '60s and early '70s.
But Bob Hope wasn't vilified for making a gay joke. He made a joke about AIDS, a terminal illness, in 1986, at a ceremony for the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. The tasteless, unfunny joke, which referenced actor Rock Hudson, who had died a
year before, was particularly appalling because of the reaction of two audience
members, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. Maybe Reagan can be excused for his
chortling at the joke, since he was so senile by then that he took his cues from
his wife to laugh. Despite her dependency on diet pills, Nasty Nancy still should have been lucid enough to refrain from laughter at the unfunny joke at the expense of
Hudson, who had been a personal friend of the Reagans. When he was diagnosed with
AIDS, Hudson had asked the Reagans to grant him permission to travel to France for
some specialized treatment for his condition. Nancy, not wishing to be connected
to someone with a (gasp) "gay" disease, refused to grant him any favors; the Reagans basically turned their backs on their old friend. Nancy frowned upon
anything that implied sexual promiscuity (maybe because of her own promiscuous past during her Hollywood days).
Hope capitalized on the Vietnam war with those tedious Christmas shows, which
soldiers where strong-armed into attending (if they were polite enough to sit through Hope's lame jokes, they were rewarded with seeing pretty starlets).
I'm not crying, you fool, I'm laughing!
Hewwo.

I'm a liberal and I love Bob Hope.

In all my 50 years, I've never once heard anything like that. You're making a lot of assumptions that don't seem to be backed up by anything.