Don Imus blurted out what every crusty old white Republican watching the Rutgers women’s basketball game was probably thinking, but if he had called them “dykes” (which is the other label these old farts had in mind, I’m sure) instead of “nappy-headed ho’s,” he’d still be on the air every morning hobnobbing with the Gang of 500 and raking in millions from CBS radio and MSNBC.
Gay actor and writer Harvey Fierstein put it this way in a New York Times oped:
For the past two decades political correctness has been derided as a surrender to thin-skinned, humorless, uptight oversensitive sissies. Well, you anti-politically correct people have won the battle, and we’re all now feasting on the spoils of your victory. During the last few months alone we’ve had a few comedians spout racism, a basketball coach put forth anti-Semitism and several high-profile spoutings of anti-gay epithets.
What surprises me, I guess, is how choosy the anti-P.C. crowd is about which hate speech it will not tolerate. Sure, there were voices of protest when the TV actor Isaiah Washington called a gay colleague a “faggot.†But corporate America didn’t pull its advertising from “Grey’s Anatomy,†as it did with Mr. Imus, did it? And when Ann Coulter likewise tagged a presidential candidate last month, she paid no real price.
In fact, when Bill Maher discussed Ms. Coulter’s remarks on his HBO show, he repeated the slur no fewer than four times himself; each mention, I must note, solicited a laugh from his audience. No one called for any sort of apology from him. (Well, actually, I did, so the following week he only used it once.)
Face it, if a Pentagon general, his salary paid with my tax dollars, can label homosexual acts as “immoral†without a call for his dismissal, who are the moral high and mighty kidding?
I believe that the reason Imus was fired was directly connected to the amount of uproar that was caused by his comment.
Soooo… (and maybe I’m totally in naive in thinking this) but I believe that if his comments were anti-homosexual and the same amount of comments, complaints, uproar, etc. occurred that he would still have been fired.
Although I do sometimes live in a dream world so the odds are.. that your reality-based comments are more likely than mine… except that I don’t think that all republicans were thinking what Imus said.
I’m astonished that no one has mentioned that the word “dyke” is now no longer officially offensive. This change of connotation is the result of the San Francisco motorbike club Dykes On Bikes to obtain a copyright. Here’s the story:
[Link]
An excerpt:
“The U.S. Patent and Trademark office twice rejected the group’s application on the grounds the term “dyke” was offensive and derogatory. The office reversed itself after the group’s lawyers appealed, submitting hundreds of pages of additional material that they said showed the slang word does not disparage lesbians.”
If Imus had called the women”dykes,” he could have claimed that he meant it as a compliment.
-dwvr
“Dyke” is equally as offensive as “faggot,” I think.
There was a movement 20 years ago in gay circles to use these words in order to defang them. It never appealed to me, and I’m not sure how effective it was.
On the other hand, I think the movement to take back the word “liberal” is working very well.
This is a flawed and and pre-opinionated editorial about Don Imus. Imus is a talk show host on a so-called news channel. The insensitive comments he made were on the air. They were not off camera, they were not edited, they were broadcast on TV and radio. Isaih Washington’s comments were not on the air, but to a co-worker off the air. The TV show “Grey’s Anatomy” did not tape these comments, did not broadcast these comments, so why should Grey’s Anatomy bear any responsibility at all? Imus’s comments were deliberately delivered across the air and radio waves, under the watch of MSNBC. These two instances are apples and oranges my friend