"On Taking Offense"

14 March 2007
777 words

For those who missed Ann Coulter’s gay joke at John Edwards’ expense (“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.’”), you should know that contrary to most reports, the assembled audience did not dissolve into mammoth laughter and applause – but there was enough to suggest the reaction Coulter got wasn’t simple politeness.

Jokes fail for a variety of reasons (other than not being funny). In this case, I’m not sure enough people understood Coulter’s backhanded reference to Isaiah Washington, a prime time quality actor (that is no compliment) who stars in a dry hump of a show called Grey’s Anatomy, and who recently checked himself into rehab after calling a fellow cast member “faggot.” (Rehab for what, we’ll never know. Better he spend the money on acting lessons.) But for the most part, “Edwards is gay” just doesn’t make sense, and no sober audience should rescue any speaker from a premise that flawed.

Not enough to let Coulter flounder on stage, Edwards responded by prattling on about the politics of personal destruction (or the Two Americas, or something – does anyone pay attention to his speeches anymore?) as hordes of self-hating flapping heads ran to the nearest camera to exorcise themselves of the heartfelt belief that making gay jokes is a horrible, horrible thing, on par with genocide and cancer and dead kittens, et cetera.

Meanwhile, how many of those gravely offended by Coulter’s insult have given a second (or first) thought to the two virulently anti-Catholic bloggers Candidate Edwards hired to assist on the Internet side of his campaign (such as it is)? Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan both resigned after being exposed and derided by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Bill Donohue; Marcotte for writing things like, “What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?” and McEwan for things like, “[N]ow we turn our backs on the advancements that will define the twenty-first century … turning instead to the imaginary tradition of a governing Judeo-Christian ethic, forged only in the small minds of religious zealots, rather than actual history.” Gee whiz.

“Resigned” ought not be confused with “fired.” “Fired” would have suggested Edwards is capable of taking a moral stand not first sanctioned by MoveOn.org (which really would have been something). While claiming to be “personally offended” by such remarks, Edwards was willing to keep Marcotte and McEwan on board in the interest of giving folks “a fair shake,” never mind how quickly they’d have been bounced had they a history of dropping “faggot” into their (poorly written) blog posts.

To the trained observer, the fact Edwards didn’t see fit to turn the other cheek to Coulter, but did to his staff, translates into an interesting peculiarity: For John Edwards, gays matter more than Catholics. Which is fine if your job is to troll about the Internet for a living, something else altogether if you want to be President of the United States, where that sort of clear bias can be damaging. The seventeen serious Democrats still supporting Edwards should hope the former senator is as bothered by hatred of Catholics amongst his pivotal staff as he is a bad fag joke hurled at him by a distant commentator, about whom he could care less.

Now, why would a homosexual’s taking offense to a candidate’s non-action matter more than a Catholic’s taking offense? Well, Edwards has made a gamble based upon the direction of things within his party: If a liberal candidate is even rumored to be abandoning gays (e.g., by not responding forcefully enough to things like Coulter’s poorly constructed joke), he will lose virtually all of Democratism in the pink and feathery aftermath. But if the same liberal forsakes Catholics, he’ll lose only a comparatively few Democrats, which is a chance Edwards is much more willing to take.

I’ve often wondered something. Let’s say you’ve splattered a depiction of Mary with elephant dung, or dropped a crucifix into a jar of urine; in the liberal consciousness, you have (somehow) created art. Now let’s say you fling those same droppings onto an impressionist painting of Gloria Steinem, or remove the crucifix from that jar and replace it with a laminated, two-sided picture of Jack and Bobby Kennedy – then what do you have? Do the liberals who ridiculed those Jesus Christers for their full-throated opposition to Ofili’s “The Virgin Mary” or Serrano’s “Piss Christ” still have the same open mind, or have we then moved on to another plane?