ANN COULTER AND H.R.C.--A QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP

I wrote the following commentary for Gay City News, which will publish it tomorrow:

You’d have to be living under a rock in Fiji without electricity to not have heard by now how the odious ultra-conservative pitbull Ann Coulter (left) called Sen. John Edwards (right) a “faggot” during her remarks last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). But what you may not have heard is what an organization calling itself the Human  Rights Campaign (HRC) did in response to Coulter’s bigoted slur.

Not content with simply denouncing this latest evidence that Coulter is infected with a particularly virulent form of intellectual rabies, HRC decided to reach deep into the Christian right’s grab-bag of intimidation tricks and organize a national letter-writing campaign demanding of Universal Press Syndicate that it simply stop distributing her column to the 100-odd newspapers around the country that publish Coulter’s syndicated lacerations.

And now it’s HRC that is taking incoming from gay writers and editors who still hold to the increasingly quaint notion that freedom of speech applies even to those whose speech we don’t like -- that it is, in fact, a human right.

The first Scud launched at HRC came from longtime gay columnist Paul Varnell, whose work appears in the Chicago Free Press and is syndicated to a number of other gay papers around the country.

  “Doesn't this smack of an attempt at censorship, even prior censorship? After all Coulter hasn't used ‘faggot’ in her column, so far as I know,” Varnell (left) wrote in an e-mail to HRC that he circulated to others of us who write for gay media, adding, “This just seems like trying to silence a person whose politics the HRC disagrees with. That's never a very good grounds for attempts at censorship.”

Varnell went on to say, “And if the HRC wants Coulter banned for her politics, what principle keeps the HRC from calling my publisher or editor and demanding that they drop me from publication if I write something--as I sometimes do--that the HRC would no doubt disagree with (e.g., my recent piece arguing against banning the word ‘faggot‘)?

“Frankly, HRC's ostensible apoplexy over ‘faggot’ seems a cheap and easy divergence from HRC's ostensible mission (aren't you stepping on GLAAD's toes here?) and diversion from its failure to produce much in the way of political progress for gays and lesbians? HRC seems to have dwindled to symbolic actions, gestures, and press releases while soaking up a great deal of money from this community. Not a happy trajectory to be on,” Varnell sniffed.

After reading Varnell’s civil libertarian cry of protest, Rick Rosendall, a columnist for the Boston gay weekly Bay Windows, joined in seconding Varnell’s denunciation of HRC’s call for censorship and added this telling point in a note to HRC: “I am amazed that anyone on the pro-gay side would want to silence Ann Coulter. My response to her latest slander is KEEP COULTER TALKING.! She and her fellow right-wing provocateurs have  gone so far over the top that they are making a good case for electing more Democrats. HRC seems to be going back to the mode of [HRC director] Joe [Salmonese's] (right) predecessor, whose speech at the 2004 Democratic convention was so wrapped in victimhood that it came across as, ‘Please don't kill us!’ How lame!”

As if to prove Rosendall’s point, the three Republican presidential front-runners -- Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney (both of whom had attended the CPAC conference) and John McCain (who hadn‘t) all demonstrated just how lethal to their own chances they considered Coulter’s snarling “faggot” at Edwards when, in response to press queries, they sharply denounced her foaming-at-the-mouth anti-gay slur as “wildly irresponsible.” Edwards himself made hay with Coulter’s vicious hallucination: his campaign sent out an outraged e-mail asking for $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” to fight the right (and they got it.)

And even before HRC launched its “Off With Her Hands!” ukase, four newspapers in parts of the country that would never be mistaken for gay-friendly paradises -- the Shreveport, Louisiana Times; the Lake Charles, Louisiana Press; the Sevierville, Texas Mountain Press; and the Lancaster, Pennsylvania New Era -- had already independently announced they were all dropping Coulter’s column of their own accord because she’d barked “faggot” at the Democratic presidential contender from North Carolina.

I e-mailed a dozen gay editors and writers to get their views of HRC’s heavy-handed effort to kill Coulter’s column.

Mark Segal, publisher of Philadelphia Gay News and former president of the National Gay Press Association, wrote back: “HRC seems to be getting out ahead of the victim himself, John Edwards. The gay rights struggle started to end censorship about our community so we could be positively viewed. Allowing Coulter a continued voice will allow the world to see what kind of monster she is, and allow us to see who our true friends are since we'll see who hires her.”

Lesbian blogger Pam Spaulding -- whose well-read Pam’sHouseBlend.com was voted “best LGBT blog” in the 2006 Weblog awards -- told me: “Personally, I'm fine with letting her continue spouting the bile; she provides a look into the mind of the Republican base. She's their Id and they know it. One can see that by reading the reaction of some conservative bloggers -- ones who attended the CPAC conference. They later wrote an open letter condemning Coulter and distancing themselves from her remarks, mostly because her ‘faggot’ lobbing forced them to confront the homophobia in their ranks.”

Mike Chase, editor-publisher of the biweekly Baltimore OutLoud, responded: “I think the HRC is jumping the gun here in attempting to quiet Coulter by seeking to have her column dropped by Universal Press. Actually Coulter is the kind of rabid opposition that makes us stronger. Her comments are so transparent, calculated to arouse a reaction to serve her own mercenary interests. Who really cares what Ann Coulter says, anyway.I think the HRC is looking to score some easy points. I would much rather see that organization working to fix the gay marriage mess (which they share some responsibility in creating) That is something far more important than the rantings of a right wing hatchet queen.”

And Cynthia Laird, News Editor of the California gay weekly Bay Area Reporter, said of Varnell’s protest: “I do agree that this action smacks of an attempt at censorship, which I just can't tolerate. I also agree that as gay people, we have often found ourselves in a similar situation where people want to prevent us from speaking.”

(I’d like to think the other editors whose views I’d solicited were just too busy to respond, rather than wary of taking on HRC or, worse, uncomprehending of the free speech issues involved in the organization’s action.)

It’s dangerous for a gay group like HRC to issue a demand for suppression of a writer, even of someone as repulsive as Coulter. In doing so, those who claim to speak for all lesbians and gays surrender the moral high ground to the theocratic censorship drives of the Christian right. Not only does HRC’s action allow Coulter to pose as a martyr and a victim of the Homintern, it’s also a very slippery slope on which to embark, because the Christers are bigger and better-funded than we are -- we’ll be on the losing end.

Two years ago, I did an investigative report for the L.A. Weekly on “The New Blacklist: How Corporate America Is Bowing to Anti-Gay Christian Groups’ Boycott Demands.” I found out that Christer boycott campaigns targeting what they termed “pro-gay” programming had forced Procter & Gamble to pull advertising from TV shows like “Will & Grace” and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy“; that “Desperate Housewives” lost ads from Safeway, Tyson Foods, Liberty Mutual, Kohl’s, Alberto Culver, Leapfrog, and Lowe’s; that “Life As We Know It” had ads pulled by McCormick, Lenscrafters, Radio Shack, Papa John’s International, and Chattem and Sharpe; and that “South Park” had ads pulled by Foot Locker, Geico, Finish Line, and Best Buy….and that’s just a partial list.

You’d call that censorship, wouldn’t you? But is there any moral difference between those Christer letter-writing demands for suppression of speech and HRC’s? Surely not. And there’s an old civil libertarian principle that says: the only effective answer to bad speech is….more and better speech.