Hate Monger

The recent uproar about Ann Coulter's derisive “faggot” comments, hurled towards former Sen. John Edwards, is well deserved. Her shtick wore very thin for most socially responsible people long ago, but there are still plenty of low brows with limited intellectual capacities that hang on her every word.

America has many people of conscience and morality that can strongly and clearly rebut the sickness that is endemic within the psyches of Coulter and all of her adoring cultists. As an example, Andrew Sullivan has a good post that responds to her vile cruelness:

Coulter's defense of the slur is that it was directed at an obviously straight man and so could not be a real slur. The premise of this argument is that the word faggot is only used to describe gay men and is only effective and derogatory when used against a gay man. But it isn't. In fact, in the schoolyard she cites, the primary targets of the f-word are straight boys or teens or men. The word "faggot" is used for two reasons: to identify and demonize a gay man; and to threaten a straight man with being reduced to the social pariah status of a gay man. Coulter chose the latter use of the slur, its most potent and common form. She knew why Edwards qualified. He's pretty, he has flowing locks, he's young-looking. He is exactly the kind of straight guy who is targeted as a "faggot" by his straight peers. This, Ms Coulter, is real social policing by speech. And that's what she was doing: 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.........

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......

In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a Marine 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 serviceman to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men "boys"? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that's what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said - and conservatives applauded - that I and so many others are not men........

If Americans really want to restore civility and respect to public discourse, they need to rise up strongly, loudly, and forcefully against the despoilers and haters in our midst. That Coulter is one of them can readily be seen. It's good to see that people are starting to shut her off.
Posted on The Human Stain