Today in things we should be ashamed of: Miranda Devine, person who knows someone who knows someone who knows a gay person and sleeps atop a bed of dead shelter animals each night, reached deep into her hate cauldron this week and pulled out an abhorrent pile of horse shit titled NRL Bosses Are Totally Gay.
As you might come to expect from a person so lacking in basic human empathy and prone to delusion as to suggest that the recent pregnancy of Penny Wong’s partner Sophie Allouache was cause for concern because a “fatherless society” caused the London riots, she fails to fully understand why calling someone “gay” to insult them (regardless of their sexuality) is by nature homophobic.
Let’s back that up a bit. The piece was written in response to an NRL decision to hand down a two match suspension to 19 year old West Tigers representative Mitchell Moses for calling an opposition player a “fucking gay cunt” during the 69th minute of a recent under-20s state of origin match.
No biggie says Devine who contends that “it is just tyrannical to demand that people must use a word only in the form approved by homosexual activists,” all the while bemoaning the left’s “modern day crusade to hunt down homophobes”.
She later writes that “He was being offensive but he was not being homophobic, which last time I looked meant “an extreme and irrational aversion to homosexuality and homosexual people”. Bateman isn’t even homosexual. What more evidence do you need that Mitchell didn’t say “gay” as a homophobic slur?”
But unlike a teenager speaking with haste during the heat of a football match, Miranda Devine is someone who is paid to choose her words carefully. By failing to recognise that “gay” as an insult instead of a way to denote someone’s sexuality is derogatory to gay people regardless of the speaker’s intent, her article does an awful lot to normalise language which seeks to demean gay people.
Miranda, if you can divert some time away from watching old South Park episodes to support your porous arguments may we suggest watching this quick speech by Ash Beckham, a lesbian and equal rights advocate who argues that the proliferation of the pejorative use of the word “gay” deployed in phrases such as “that’s so gay” or the terrible headline of your article inherently teaches us to associate that term’s prevailing definition – homosexual – with inferior, bad or unwanted. How does this condition young people to feel about gay people? How does this condition gay people to feel about themselves.
“Say what you mean, and mean what you say because the words that you choose matter. When you use ‘gay’ in a pejorative way, the effect that it has on the gay kid in the room or the kid with gay relatives is that being gay is less than or inferior to,” Beckham says. “We need all hands in on this one. Societal change begins with small steps. When you hear someone describe something pejoratively as ‘so gay,’ it’s an opportunity for connection, and conversation not to be missed.”
And this isn’t just reactionary “homo-fascism” (your words). In 2012, a University of Michigan study published in the Journal of American College Health found that the use of the word “gay” in the pejorative can have a negative effect on young LGBT people. Specifically, the study found LGBT students who frequently heard phrases such as “that’s so gay” were “more likely to report feeling isolated and to suffer negative health symptoms, such as headaches, poor appetite or eating problems.”
That’s just a whisper. Imagine what you could do with a megaphone.
