Fa**ots, Ni**ers, and C**lter
I hate — HATE — to pour out more virtual ink about that “horse-faced” blonde pundit, but it seems to me both sides are addressing her CPAC incident poorly.
This incident is not about the use of the actual word, or even really about First Amendment rights. I, for one, agree with John Cloud in Time: the woman has a perfect right to say what she wants to say (we also have a perfect right to boycott her works, protest her syndication, etc), up to and including the ultimate prohibited speech: ni**er. Andrew Sullivan mentioned the real issue that no one wants to talk about, though he buried it several paragraphs into his response:
“[She was] trying to delegitimize and feminize a man by calling him a faggot. It happens every day. It’s how insecure or bigoted straight men police their world to keep the homos out.
And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest.“
(emphasis mine)
This is the real underlying issue — the reason the gay community is really angry, the reason the audience at CPAC laughed and applauded: “gay” (and its nastier 6-letter cousin) is still an effective, widely used insult.
Unfortunately, precisely because a “gay” label is still an insult, it is also an argumentative albatross; few are willing to risk focusing on its central role in this incident, even though doing so might pull some small shreds of redemption from an otherwise empty partisan slugfest. Most have so far focused on “What she said” or “the word” or the “hate speech.” Let Ms. Coulter say the worst words, if she wants, but don’t let them obscure the role of deeper prejudice that is the real concern.
