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Comments, possibly informed.

Tim Wilson
Daytona Beach, Florida, USA
timatollah@mackandtim.net
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Homophobia

In a post here, InstaPundit, who is, by and large, really together about issues pertaining to personal sexuality and the like, links to this post by Charles Murtaugh. The issue Charles brings up concerns incidence of left-wing homophobia, and whether it's related to Andrew Sullivan's visibility.

My own sense of these matters is that expecting left-wing people to be perfectly consistent regarding not exhibiting homophobic behavior is like expecting anybody, gay people included, to be consistent regarding homophobia. Ever hear of internalized homophobia?

Yes, it's fair to hold visible institutions like the Montana Democratic Party to high standards concerning seeming or obvious homophobic behavior, but it's not clear to me that expecting consistency in this regard from a large collection of left-wing bloggers, or even non-web pundits, is reasonable. Fair game, yes; reasonable given the vagaries of human behavior, no.

After all, just a few posts down from his entry about left-wing homophobia, in this post, Glenn quotes from Bitchpundit, including the following regarding Islamic yahoos trying to hack her.

Buncha script kiddies, that's all these butt pirates are. They can't wage real war, so they are sending Hi-Tek Teenage Mutant Ninja Muslims from Bloggerstan, instead.

I don't know about you, but "butt pirates" seems to be used pretty consistently to denigrate homosexual activity.

Consistency is difficult. So, let's just call things homophobic when they're homophobic and not worry as much about whether it's coming from the left or the right.
posted by Tim Wilson at 6:54 PM