Those Christian conservatives can be such a plucky group, saving the world and all. God love ‘em.

But Olympic sprinter Tyson Gay might be wishing they would find something better to do with their time.

It seems the mavericks at the American Family Association, who operate the Christian conservative site OneNewsNow.com, changed their filter to auto-search the AP stories they wanted to run and replace the word "gay" with "homosexual."

But the IT folks at American Family hadn't thought this through.

And last week headlines on OneNewsNow began replacing Tyson's last name with "homosexual."

"Homosexual eases into 100 final," reads the headline on one AP story.

Blogger Ben Zimmer at Language Log writes about the hazards of auto-search and spell-check goofs. Microsoft, he writes, had to go into damage control over its Office 2007 which recommended "Osama" whenever it picked up "Obama."

The folks at Microsoft should get a pass.

The phobes at American Family should be dunked in the nearest pond. They've corrected the Tyson Gay problem and the word homosexual is free to arouse OneNewsNow readers in ways that gay didn't.