I promise to stop manifesting my gayness upon my livejournal
after this one:
Dan Savage Post
Ann Coulter went on Fox News last night to defend herself-she was invited on CNN, with John Aravosis of Americablog, but she bailed. Apparently Coulter didn’t want to go on TV with an out homosexual-you know, someone that might argue with her-so she went on TV with that total faggot Sean Hannity instead. Here’s Andrew Sullivan on Coulter’s Fox News appearance:
I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a “faggot” on the same stage as presidential candidates and as an icon of today’s conservative movement….
I’m not going to breathe more oxygen into this story except to say a couple of things that need saying. Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it’s worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn’t homophobic. It was, in her words, a “school-yard taunt,” directed at a straight man, meaning a “wuss” and a “sissy”. Why would gays care? She is “pro-gay,” after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into “reparative therapy” to “cure” them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.
Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And when you unpack Coulter’s joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a “faggot.” She’s absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that-a better one, to be sure-but a joke. But she didn’t just do that. She added to the joke a slur: “John Edwards is a faggot.” That’s why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised.
Of course it’s homophobic to insult a straight man by calling him a homosexual-whatever term you use. The joke relies on pure homophobic prejudice, i.e. the notion that being gay is so self-evidently revolting, so disgusting, that simply associating a straight man with homosexuality or homosexuals diminishes him and makes him ridiculous. Coulter’s joke-calling Edwards a sissy or a faggot or whatever-amused the attendees at CPAC because it lumped him, a heterosexual man with a wife and three kids, in with them, all those less-than-men homosexuals with their limp wrists and sissified ways.
Andrew Sullivan nails it:
And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men-and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth…. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight-the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.
Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a soldier come out to tell their stories. I’d like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American solider to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss?
But, hey, the right sets the rules for our national debate-the right tells us what is and is not acceptable. So from here on out it’s officially not homophobic to call a man a faggot-so long as the man is straight. Like that faggot Sean Hannity. Or that faggot Rush Limbaugh. Or that faggot George W. Bush. Or that faggot Bill O’Reilly. Or that faggot George Will.
Fuckers.
Dan Savage Post
Ann Coulter went on Fox News last night to defend herself-she was invited on CNN, with John Aravosis of Americablog, but she bailed. Apparently Coulter didn’t want to go on TV with an out homosexual-you know, someone that might argue with her-so she went on TV with that total faggot Sean Hannity instead. Here’s Andrew Sullivan on Coulter’s Fox News appearance:
I watched Ann Coulter last night in the gayest way I could. I was on a stairmaster at a gym, slack-jawed at her proud defense of calling someone a “faggot” on the same stage as presidential candidates and as an icon of today’s conservative movement….
I’m not going to breathe more oxygen into this story except to say a couple of things that need saying. Coulter has an actual argument in self-defense and it’s worth addressing. Her argument is that it was a joke and that since it was directed at a straight man, it wasn’t homophobic. It was, in her words, a “school-yard taunt,” directed at a straight man, meaning a “wuss” and a “sissy”. Why would gays care? She is “pro-gay,” after all. Apart from backing a party that wants to strip gay couples of all legal rights by amending the federal constitution, kick them out of the military where they are putting their lives on the line, put them into “reparative therapy” to “cure” them, keep it legal to fire them in many states, and refusing to include them in hate crime laws, Coulter is very pro-gay. As evidence of how pro-gay she is, check out all the gay men and women in America now defending her.
Her defense, however, is that she was making a joke, not speaking a slur. Her logic suggests that the two are mutually exclusive. They’re not. And when you unpack Coulter’s joke, you see she does both. Her joke was that the world is so absurd that someone like Isaiah Washington is forced to go into rehab for calling someone a “faggot.” She’s absolutely right that this is absurd and funny and an example of p.c. insanity. She could have made a joke about that-a better one, to be sure-but a joke. But she didn’t just do that. She added to the joke a slur: “John Edwards is a faggot.” That’s why people gasped and then laughed and clapped so heartily. I was in the room, so I felt the atmosphere personally. It was an ugly atmosphere, designed to make any gay man or woman in the room feel marginalized and despised.
Of course it’s homophobic to insult a straight man by calling him a homosexual-whatever term you use. The joke relies on pure homophobic prejudice, i.e. the notion that being gay is so self-evidently revolting, so disgusting, that simply associating a straight man with homosexuality or homosexuals diminishes him and makes him ridiculous. Coulter’s joke-calling Edwards a sissy or a faggot or whatever-amused the attendees at CPAC because it lumped him, a heterosexual man with a wife and three kids, in with them, all those less-than-men homosexuals with their limp wrists and sissified ways.
Andrew Sullivan nails it:
And for the slur to work, it must logically accept the premise that gay men are weak, effeminate, wusses, sissies, and the rest. A sane gay man has two responses to this, I think. The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men-and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth…. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight-the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.
Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a soldier come out to tell their stories. I’d like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American solider to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss?
But, hey, the right sets the rules for our national debate-the right tells us what is and is not acceptable. So from here on out it’s officially not homophobic to call a man a faggot-so long as the man is straight. Like that faggot Sean Hannity. Or that faggot Rush Limbaugh. Or that faggot George W. Bush. Or that faggot Bill O’Reilly. Or that faggot George Will.
Fuckers.