Faggot

I know I’m a day late and a dollar short by posting on this topic now, but the post I started writing about the boyfriend’s and my new get-up-at-freakin’-6:00 workout schedule wasn’t really crystallizing into anything interesting.

But Jake! you might say. Nothing you write ever crystallizes into anything interesting!

You MIGHT say that, but I’m going to pretend you never would. Besides, you’re in the third paragraph of this post, so you must think I’m going to get interesting eventually.

And now you’re in the fourth paragraph—the one where I finally get to my potentially interesting point: Ann Coulter, the vituperative bad-girl talking head of the Republicans’ well-oiled ugly machine.

For those of you not inclined to surf the gay blogosphere on a regular basis, Coulter referred to Democratic candidate John Edwards as a “faggot” on Friday in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Her choice of language in that context reveals everything we need to know about her thoughtfulness, intelligence and maturity. And the fact that her words were met with cheering and applause uncovers a lot of ugly truth about the Republican party and the effect its theocratic rhetoric has had on its followers.

Coulter has since dismissed her choice of language as a “schoolyard word,” insisting she didn’t mean to offend anyone. Coulter’s oeuvre proves, however, that offending people is the driving force behind her writing and speaking. It’s no stretch to say she’s made a career of it. And while “faggot” is very much a schoolyard word, it is also the very word people use when they attack and beat and kill gay people from the schoolyard to the sidewalk in front of the gay bar. It carries the same weight as “nigger,” and her use of it—especially in a context tied to the political management of this country—is inexcusable.

Fortunately, the Conservative Political Action Conference incident has prompted a growing number of papers to drop her syndicated column, and her web site has lost a number of advertisers as well.

The HRC has also launched a letter-writing campaign to persuade Universal Press Syndicate to drop Coulter as one of its writers.

I have sent various permutations of the following words to the papers who have dropped her and to Universal Press Syndicate. Feel free to do the same, in your own words or in blatant plagiarism of mine:

I’m all for the discussion of ideas and the respectful clash of ideologies, but Ann Coulter has proven time and time again that she’s incapable of high-minded discourse.

She’s constantly exposed for not doing her homework before she writes, she treats gross oversimplification as thoughtful interpretation, and she thinks words like “faggot” are acceptable to everyone and—apparently—unharmful to anyone.

In short, she’s a professional adolescent. She’s not only an embarrassment to any paper who carries her invectives, but her vapid writing gives a misguided sense of validation to anyone who equates meaningless sound bytes and faggot-bashing with intelligence.