Experts I talked to couldn’t pinpoint an exact origin, but a search back through newspaper archives reveals that the line has been around for more than a century. (There are a number of “Dear Abby” queries that have opened along the lines of this letter, from 1971: “DEAR ABBY, First let me say some of my best friends are homosexual, I have nothing against them, but…”) The phrase’s earliest recorded political use was back in 1908.