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When hate speech becomes accepted
By Rev. Irene Monroe
Hate speech is not a passive form of
public speech. And one of the signs of an intolerant
society is its hate speech, whether used jokingly or
intentionally, aimed at specific groups of people. When
this form of verbal abuse becomes part and parcel of the
everyday parlance between people, we have created a
society characterized by its zero-tolerance of inclusion
and diversity, where name-calling becomes an accepted
norm.
Lately this Republican political era
of “compassionate conservatism” has brought forward an
unabashed no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to
passionate invective hurled at queers,
African-Americans, and Jews.
In an interview with Ann Coulter,
author of Godless: The Church of Liberalism, on
the July 27 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with host Chris
Matthews, Coulter called former vice president Al Gore a
"fag,” and she hinted that Bill Clinton might be gay.
“How do you know that Bill Clinton is
gay?” Matthews asked.
“He may not be gay, but Al Gore,
total fag. No, I’m just kidding,” Coulter stated. And in
referring to Clinton, Coulter continued, “I mean,
everyone has always known wildly promiscuous
heterosexual men have, as I say, a whiff of the
bathhouse about them.”
Perhaps Coulter intended to be funny
or satirical, yet her remarks are not only directed
toward Gore and Clinton but also toward lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer people. Coulter is
taking a swipe at Gore, Clinton, and the entire LGBTQ
community in one fell swoop, and with just one word.
Let us not forget that the word and
image of fag derives from the word faggot, which is a
bundle of sticks for burning, and that LGBTQ people were
supposedly righteously burned at the stake in medieval
England.
And let us not forget Matthew
Shepard, the openly gay Wyoming student who in 1998 was
bludgeoned and left to die in near-freezing temperatures
while tethered to a rough-hewn wooden fence.
Or 1999, when Billy Jack Gaither, a
well-respected and beloved textile worker in Alabama,
was bludgeoned with an ax handle, burned, and left to
die on a pile of tires because he was gay.
And some claim the Bible refers to us
stoking the fires of hell.
But the real hell we LGBTQ people
confront from this type of name-calling and stereotyping
is a societal disparage of sexual relations between
people of the same gender, in a society where both the
church and government bar us from marriage, many states
bar us from adoption, and the federal government forbids
our serving in the military.
The hate speech doesn’t just stop
with LGBTQ people. Jews are also a target.
Devout Catholic and staunch
Republican Mel Gibson, the megastar behind The
Passion of the Christ, got pulled over while driving
more than 80 miles an hour in Malibu on July 28 and flew
into a tirade, spewing both sexist and anti-Semitic
vitriol. “Fucking Jews,” he reportedly said to police.
“The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.
Are you a Jew?" To a female officer he reportedly said,
"What do you think you're looking at, sugar tits?”
(Gibson, who had an open bottle of tequila in the
car, was charged with drunken driving, his blood alcohol
level reportedly 50% above the legal limit.)
Animus toward Jews is not new. It
dates back as early as the Jewish Diaspora between the
8th to the 6th centuries BCE, and as late as Hitler's
attempted genocide of European Jewry.
The relationship between homophobia
and anti-Semitism is that Christian fundamentalists
target gays and Jews for not adhering to the “true”
tenets of Christianity. Christian fundamentalists also
target gays and Jews because the two groups can overlap
in terms of personal identity, and can be the target of
religiously motivated violence.
Racial epithets are such a mainstay
in the American lexicon that their broad-based appeal to
both blacks as well as whites have anesthetized us not
only to the damaging and destructive use of epithets,
but also to our ignorance of their historical origins.
My state's governor, Mitt Romney of
Massachusetts, apologized this week for using the racial
epithet “tar baby" at a Republican political gathering
in Iowa over the weekend while describing a collapse in
a Big Dig tunnel that killed a Boston woman on July 10.
He said the best thing he could do politically is to
"just get as far away from that tar baby" of a subject
as he could.
Tar baby is a pejorative term
referring to African-American children, especially
girls, and was used by whites during American slavery.
Today, the term has come to depict a sticky mess or
situation, referring to the 19th-century Uncle Remus
stories in which a doll made of tar was used to trap
Brer Rabbit.
Eric Fehrnstrom, the governor's
spokesman said, “The governor was describing a sticky
situation. He was unaware that some people find the term
objectionable, and he's sorry if anyone was offended."
How could a man who is the governor of the diverse state
of Massachusetts, and who wants to be president, not
know this?
The relationship between homophobia
and racism is shown in how LGBTQ and African-American
civil rights struggles are pitted against each other by
our enemies. It also appears in the federal government’s
new HIV/AIDS supposed prevention program, which
requires all public-health authorities and agencies to
report the identities of HIV-positive patients. It’s a
program in which African-Americans—straight or
queer—will ostensibly feel profiled.
Language is a representation of
culture, and it perpetuates ideas and assumptions about
race, gender, religion, and sexual orientation that we
consciously, and unconsciously, articulate in our
everyday conversations about ourselves and the rest of
the world—and, consequently, transmit generationally.
The liberation of a people is also
rooted in the liberation from abusive language, which is
essentially hate hurled at them. Using epithets,
especially jokingly, does not eradicate its historical
baggage or the existing social relations among us.
Instead, dislodging these epithets from their historical
context makes us insensitive and arrogant to the
historical injustices done to specific group of
Americans.
It allows all Americans to become
numb to the use and abuse of the power of hate speech
because of the currency these epithets still have.
Any kind of hate speech, sugarcoated
with humor or irony or not, thwarts the daily struggle
in which many us engage in trying to ameliorate human
relations. 3 August 2006
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updated 2 November 2007 |
