A Woman of Her Time

When my generation was in grade school, many a mother used the old rhyme “sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me” to teach their kids to pay little attention to taunts from unfriendly schoolmates. The “sticks and stones” philosophy did a pretty good job of protecting us from insults but basically it was the Golden Rule from the Bible, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” that worked the best.

Of course, that didn’t mean that we were never called names…or that we didn’t respond to those taunts with insults of our own. For the record, I did use the term “brace face” one time, but in my defense it was the only retort I could think of after being called “pizza face” during the acne crisis of 1973.

Is controversial columnist Ann Coulter helping to energize conservatives or simply alienating centrists from the Republican Party? Time cover courtesy of Time Warner Publications.

It’s a learning curve that all human beings go through to find out where society draws the line. For most of us, we grow up and figure out that spending time with people who want to call us names is not even worth the trouble. They are a bunch of doo-doo heads. Who needs them?

You can’t always hide from your enemies, however, especially when they are on TV.

North Carolina’s John Edwards discovered that fact earlier this year when conservative commentator Ann Coulter talked about him during a speech at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference. She said, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I’m kind of at an impasse.”

Who is Ann Coulter, you ask, and why should anyone care what she has to say? Well, the first answer is easy: She is a syndicated columnist, author, television correspondent and the darling of the conservative right. Why anyone gives a doughnut hole about her opinion is beyond me.

But many conservatives find her fresh, sexy and alluring—adjectives in short supply among the ranks of Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others. So what that she uses phrases such as “camel jockey,” “raghead” and “tent merchant” to describe Arabs? Who cares that she has stated on many occasions that American liberals hate Christians?

Well, evidently some people do care about what comes out of her mouth. The Times of Shreveport in Louisiana, The Oakland Press in Michigan, The Mountain Press of Sevierville, Tennessee, and The New Era in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, all dropped her column over her use of the word “faggot.”

One of the scary things (among many) about Coulter is that she honestly believes that “faggot” is the worst insult she can hurl. Recently, while a guest on the show The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch,” Coulter stated of President Bill Clinton, “I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.”

Whatever your opinion of Clinton, I think we would all have to agree that he is more of a ladies’ man. Some would go so far as to use the phrase “hound dog,” but that’s beside the point.

Coulter’s inference that Clinton has homosexual tendencies, latent or otherwise, was an attempt to say the worst thing possible about him, and in Coulter’s World, homosexual is the worst thing you can be.

I believe it is the ultra-conservative right’s obsession with homosexuality that is one of the primary reasons that the voting public has become increasingly impatient with Republicans in higher office. It’s time to face the facts. Just about every American has at least one friend, coworker or relative who is homosexual. Heck, even Vice President Cheney’s daughter Mary is a lesbian and she and her partner Heather Poe do little, if anything, to hide that fact.

To paraphrase the chant used at many a gay pride parade, “they’re here, they’re queer, get used to it.”

Beyond the question of civil rights and equality, we also have to wonder if the discrimination of homosexuals in this country is a threat to all Americans. A General Accounting Office report concluded that more than 11,000 soldiers, sailors and marines were dismissed under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” service policy in 2005 alone (an 11% jump from 2004). And the GAO determined that nearly 800 dismissed gay or lesbian service members “had critical abilities, including 300 with important language skills.”

Someone should ask Ann Coulter if she thinks it is okay for a “faggot” to help defend this country from a terrorist attack.