So aren't terms like sambo, chink, slant, slope, spic and any other term that is used to describe someone else that we want to demean.
I mean, they are only words, no?
...the insanity and brainwashing of "moral relativism"
My grandma taught me the s word was sh*t and washed my mouth out with soap so I remembered this lesson forever.
YOu are insulting the memory of my grandmother and you should apologize.
They are crude and inappropriate words, to be sure. I don't use them to make personal smears. The vast majority of conservatives don't use them to make personal smears. But that isn't the point. The left's control of our language is the point.
The left has an large and ever-expanding lexicon of "mere words" that it has made the basis for controlling the public discourse and for punishing people who don't buy into the left's worldview. Recently there has been talk of criminalizing global warming denials. This is a logical consequence of the left's assault on language.
At the same time the left uses its own privileged vocabulary of hate to smear and demean people like Ann Coulter, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush freely and without consequence.
That's the battle. And we're losing it. Critics of Coulter on the right are assisting the enemy to achieve its victory.
As others have pointed out, we are not talking about anything approaching the equivalent of a racial slur. Race is a characteristic rightly protected by law, public consensus and proper moral sensibility. The practice of sexual perversion is NOT.
Words that properly denigrate those who practice sick and twisted sexual perversion are appropriate, in my view.
That said, such sexually-explicit terms such as "fudge-packer" or "carpet-muncher" would indeed have been inappropriate around children, because they generate an image that is itself offensive because it is an image of the offensive sexual conduct of the perverts.
But "faggot" is neutral, and there is nothing about the practice of sexual perversion that deserves the kinds of protections properly reserved for characteristics such as race or nationality.