The New F-Word. Why the Big Deal? And Why Now? (Peggy Drexler at HuffPost)

[marmar]

Peggy Drexler


03.15.2007
The New F-Word. Why the Big Deal? And Why Now?

It's not that Ann Coulter used the word "faggot." This is the person who continues to defend her argument that women whose husbands burned alive on 9-11 are enjoying their deaths.

And it's not the media attention she received; a successful prime time television was built around people eating the entrails of cattle.

What struck me most was the depth and the breath of the reaction to a gay slur in a country that is not all that far removed from swapping AIDS jokes.
So far, five out of the 30 some papers that carry her column have dropped her. Republican candidates have run away from her. Big name sponsors have pulled out of her Web site. The New York Post got so many letters to the editor, it combined them in a separate story with most sentiment along the lines of this one: "She has mortified honorable Republicans and has assisted in pushing many of us away from the Party." She found herself on Hannity and Colmes offering the tortured explanation that "faggot" wasn't really hateful at all. Hey, it was just a "school yard taunt."
....snip....

It may even be something more fundamental still. Rather than a tipping point in the awareness and acceptance of another minority, maybe the Coulter attack reminds us that we have become a whole country of minorities.

To win the last two elections, Karl Rove had to cobble together a confederation of believers: that you should be allowed to bring your gun to work, that the right to marry is selective, that women don't have dominion over their own bodies and that Adam and Eve rode the dinosaurs to church. He squeezed out his electoral victory, but as the mid-terms showed, the seams of the coalition proved no match for the epic incompetence of the people it put in office.
.....snip....

Maybe just maybe the Ann Coulters who would continue to furiously work the levers of mistrust and division are talking to people who have simply moved on.

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peggy-drexler/the-new-fword-why-the-b_b_43508.html

[demnan]

1. I want to know why Democrats are afraid of the I word

Impeachment, that is.

[smoogatz]

2. I think the real issue is that it pretty much proves that the Republic party's got nothing left

to offer except bigotry and hate--no ideas, no policies, no no principles. Coulter's just being up-front and telling the truth about what the Republic party really stands for--and one thing no Republic politician can stand right now is one of their own, telling the truth about the Party. Next up: Ann Coulter says the expression "kill all the niggers" isn't really offensive to black people.