Well, it has been one HELL of a week. And what have we learned? Not much. People keep on killing each other, and crackers keep on making jokes about it.

I can’t even tell you how many of these “gems” came to my attention by way of the Quick Es.

Here’s a little something for all you gay-bashing shit-stompers out there in “we hate fags, too, Reverend Phelps” land.

While watching a recent episode of “Loveline,” Dr. Drew (who is a real practicing doctor and not just some quack, you know) had cause to call attention to a recent study about male sexual behavior.

Two groups of straight men were gathered. Half of the group claimed to have little to no problem with homosexuality, while the second half of the sample were self-proclaimed bigots.

Both groups were hooked up to sophisticated, electronic, medical, monitoring devices or “cockrings” which would record any activity in the nether regions.

Before you start sending in your letters and Quick Es about how wrong it is to hate the Dutch, I am talking about their penises.

Both groups were then given a saucy selection of salacious homoerotica to watch, like “Hard into Gary” or “Donnie Does Dennis” or “COPS” — you know the kind of stuff I’m on about.

Wouldn’t you know that the group that squawked the loudest about how much they hated homosexuals had the highest rate of responses.

The ones who hated gays the most got the most excited about seeing two men go at it fast and furious.

You always knew it was true though, didn’t you?

I mean, all those years I was growing up listening to the macho wankers make fun of the wussy boys by calling them “homos,” “queers” and “fags,” I just knew that their real motivation was sexual frustration!

Guys don’t really make fun of gays because they hate them so much as they hate the fact that they are secretly excited by them.

Here is how it goes. Young Slab “Not at all Gay” Hardnoggin sees a slightly-built lad with a nice ass and, before he has a chance to repress his feelings, they get the best of him.

He has to act out before he has the chance to feel ashamed.

He gets some of his cavebuddies to kick the crud out of the boy so he can get rid of that loving feeling and replace it with some good, old-fashioned hate.

A kid I knew in high school used to get boners in the shower all the time — let’s call him Rod.

I don’t know why Rod was often stimulated, and I don’t really care. I didn’t make a big deal out of it. I was sprouting wood on the bus with breathtaking regularity, so what did that make me? Wood has a life of its own; who was I to judge?

It was kind of funny, but I wasn’t sent into some kind of homicidal rage over it like a couple of the super-dominant, thick-browridge types who had to make a big show of how pissed they were that this little “fairy” was naked in the same room with us.

Well, they cornered young Rod, beat the hell out of him and then stood around high-fiving each other like a bunch of troglodytes, joyful in the knowledge that they had managed to repress their natural instincts for one more day.

What a joke. One of these guys — let’s call him Jeff (because that was his real name and I don’t care who knows it) — used to love to rack anybody he could get his sweaty little hands on.

Walking through those halls could be a nightmare of testicular agony for those of us who were comfortable enough with our masculinity to not try and touch the nads of the other boys.

This is classic projection, really. Confused by his desires to mount the other boys, in spite of what he was sure of as his “diehard heterosexuality,” Jeff entered a deep state of denial and projected his self-loathing onto others by beating them senseless while his slope-headed friends were amazed at his show of masculine prowess.

Have you ever noticed that it is always the fiercest homophobes who do the really killer imitations of gays?

They love to prance it up and do the whole limp-wristed tinkerbell thing while they mince around the room getting to act out in a fashion which would never be acceptable to them if it weren’t drenched in hatred.

So for those of you who intend to spend the next week or so reacting to the death of Matthew Shepard by passing along shit-stupid jokes you got off of the Internet and making up crass comments of your own about gays, just remember that the straight guys who have no problems with homosexuals are the ones who really have nothing to worry about.

So now that you’ve had a chance to think about it, heard any good jokes lately?

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.