Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards denounced conservative activists’ applause for a pundit who described him using a gay slur, saying Tuesday that such rhetoric had to be stopped before it poisoned the political process. At a meeting of the American Conservative Union’s Political Action Conference, conservative writer Ann Coulter said she regretted that she could not get away with calling Edwards a “faggot” because of political sensitivities. Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina who was the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee in 2004, said Tuesday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that he could not decide whether activists who laughed...