Coulter's Incessant Mouthing Off

Updated on Sunday afternoon to reflect e-mailed comments from Jeff Goldstein.

I decided to do a little digging this morning to see how the conservative blogs were responding to Ann Coulter's latest... I don't even know how to phrase what it was. "Gaffe" makes it sound accidental, "transgression" gives it an air of authority well beyond what it was. Let's just call it her latest moment of mouthing off in front of humans.

In case you missed it, here's the brief news item:

Best-selling right-wing author Ann Coulter, speaking to a conservative audience in Washington Friday, called former Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., a "faggot."

Coulter was a featured speaker at the 34th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. Following her prepared remarks, televised on C-Span, Coulter was asked to talk about Edwards.

"It turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse -- I can't really talk about Edwards," she said.

I have--as a gay person--a deeply held notion that homophobia is decidedly unfashionable in the world today, and that even moderately educated people who've traveled in any kind of social network in their lives have encountered gay people and can deal with gay people. That doesn't mean that they're flocking to vote for marriage equality or can get their minds around gay relationships, but on the basic human level, most people in most situations will accept another person in the room.

A lot of liberals will point out that this is not an absense of homophobia, and of course I agree, but another piece of being human is that we note difference and it causes us consternation. There is no way that I can look at a world history text and see it otherwise; we are creatures that are fundamentally -ist. As children our brains are as absorbtive as they are invisible while doing it; we live in cultures and are raised by our imperfect families; we learn without even knowing that we're learing.

Anyone who tells you they aren't racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or suspicious of the guy down the street is lying. The best we can hope to become is aware of our own compulsions toward these and make the decision that they will not impede us.

So it was with great joy that I read Captain's Quarters, reporting from CPAC:

At some point, Republicans will need to get over their issues with homosexuality. Regardless of whether one believes it to be a choice or a hardwired response, it has little impact on anyone but the gay or lesbian person. We can argue that homosexuality doesn't require legal protection, but not when we have our front-line activists referring to them as "faggots" or worse. That indicates a disturbing level of animosity rather than a true desire to allow people the same rights and protections regardless of their lifestyles.

I loved the quick summary by Dean Barnett on Hugh Hewitt's blog:

Idiotic. Disgusting. Stupid. Moronic.

Even Michelle Malkin is critical. Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse (which I have to admit reading more and more):

Enough is enough. I am sick to death of this woman leading people to believe that she speaks for conservatives. She doesn’t speak for me. And if you believe that she speaks for you, or if you were one of those mouth breathers who applauded when she used that disgusting epithet deliberately to hurt other people (not just John Edwards), then you are hopelessly beyond the pale yourself and would do well to examine exactly what you believe a conservative is and what is acceptable political discourse.

Anyone who reads this site knows I am not a wallflower when it comes to lashing out at my political foes. But there are limits. And Coulter regularly crosses them – not because she doesn’t know any better but because she deliberately uses hate language to get a rise out of the left and get the rest of us talking about her.

And I want to take this opportunity, while we're on the subject, to mention that I despise online writing that uses churlish spelling to demean political foes. Blog posts and comments with "Bu$h", "pResident", "Repugnicans" and the like have lost me from the get-go. We're political bloggers. If this activity is worth the effort, it must matter. These are issues we're talking about. This is philosophy and freedom. The least you could do when making an argument is avoid intentional misspellings.

Back to the bloggy roundup: Pretty much the only support I see for Coulter's inanity among the bigger right blogs (based on a Technorati search) is on Jeff Goldstein's Protein Wisdom, and even that is just an exercise in attempting to piggy-back his own lame jokes onto hers. [Correction: The linked entry was written by Dan Collins, not Jeff Goldstein. Goldstein e-mailed me to argue that his commenters are pretty harsh on Coulter, which is good to see, but I chose to focus on what the blog authors are discussing, rather than what semi-anonymous posters are saying in comments. Still, for the sake of fairness I'll note that Goldstein considers my characterization of Collins' post as "breaking from the norm" of the other linked blogs as "disingenuous". You can decide for yourself whether that's the case.]

I'd love to tell you that Coulter's day is over, but I'm sure it's not. Our culture loves celebrity for its own sake, and it isn't as though there's no audience for mainstream hate (and it isn't as though there isn't a large Republican core of it, either). In a way, it's advantageous for the public faces of it to be mainstream. When this type of hatred is pushed to the corners, it's harder to monitor.

The young Republicans at the CPAC conference reportedly laughed, after a moment, at Coulter's comment. But when the convention's over, they're going to go home to their families, their dorm rooms, their offices, and their lives, and I guarantee that you in most cases, there's a gay person in there somewhere. They're listening to speeches from Mitt Romney, who has at times supported vast measures to promote equality for gay citizens and couples. They're listening to Rudy Giuliani, who is simply not a homophobe. Many of them are still fans of George Bush and Dick Cheney, who have always been happy to manipulate a hatred of gay people that they themselves do not share. (That's a special kind of evil behavior, but it also appears to have worked itself through the American body politic).

Coulter isn't the future of the Republican Party or of anything else. She's a relic, and the contingent that she may speak for is one that can only dwindle.

Posted by shamanic at March 3, 2007 11:26 AM | TrackBack