Elizabeth Edwards Responds

Although her words did not hurt us, they may have hurt some in the gay community. We are all sick and tired of... people like Miss Coulter thinking that her use of loaded words about the homosexual community in this country is remotely humorous or appropriate.

Elizabeth Edwards had this to say in response to the ugly brouhaha arising out of the latest successful attempt by Ann Coulter to attract undeserved attention to herself yet again by behaving badly, and predictably, in public. (How it must rankle Coulter to be so cruelly eclipsed of late as the neocon High Harridan by La Malkin, how galling the epic exertions of hatespeech required to lure the mean and menacing gaze of movement conservatism her way these days!)

Edwards points out that

[t]he first reaction in the room at the conservative convention yesterday was a gasp -- a horrified gasp, even -- but it did not last. In a few seconds, those who were not horrified started clapping and drowned out the gasps.

Now it is our turn to drown out the hate. Find a way... not to sit silent in acceptance. It doesn't change until we say we will not be silent when this happens.

Nice to see that Elizabeth Edwards understands what is afoot here, and responds in a truly decent and generous way.

There has been far less of a critical response to Coulter's disgusting performance and the conservative mob's disgusting glee at that performance than attaches to whatever faux scandal de jour conservatives cough up interminably on topics that they couldn't care less about in the first place. But too many of the responses that do pause to point a hesitantly admonitory finger end up adding insult to injury in my view by failing to point out clearly enough that what was so awful in the way Coulter spit "faggot" from her fangs is the way she sought to denigrate all queer folks and not simply the blatantly false ascription of queerness to John Edwards.

One wonders if Coulter's "faggot" friends spit in her cocktails at parties, or if they are all too joyously joined at the hip in their shared sacred membership in the "haves and have-mores" contingent in the Class War to give a damn about such fripperies.