“Gay” is the new “Nigger”

Gay is the new Nigger

According to Mark Twain,

the last guarantor of free speech is profanity

 

If you are offended by this title, you are uncomfortable with free speech. If you are angry at me for this title, then you don’t understand freedom. If you want me to be prosecuted for this title, then you are party to state censorship, because this will be the next censored thing: using the word gay in an unfavorable context, regardless of whether one is talking about homosexuality, or even thinking about it when they say it.  

 

It will come to be a protected word, and any mention of it in an unfavorable way – “This weather is gay!” will result in censure at the very best, and hate crimes prosecution at the worst. Actually, not. There is something worse than hate crimes prosecution, and that is to bear the knowledge among so few—Mark Twain among them—that freedom is lost.

 

You may say, It is offensive because it casts a negative light on gay people, but let me ask you this: what did the word originally mean, and who commandeered the word in the first place? The same political rogues who stole the rainbow, that’s who it was.  Who could have imagined that one day the rainbow as a symbol could only be a celebration of homosexuality?

 

Gay as a word is in a semantic evolution. It formerly meant happy, then it meant homosexual, now it means stupid. The word would not have morphed from happy to stupid if it had not been abused and mishandled by people whose behavior is questionable. Would a phrase like, That’s so geriatric!  develop as long as old people were behaving themselves?

 

There is a new commercial on television where an adult woman rebukes a group of teenagers for using the word gay to indicate how ridiculous something was.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWS0GVOQPs0 Pardon me, but I don’t remember the speech police getting out their batons to rescue the word retarded when it came to mean stupid. Why would ignore a word which derogatorily referred to the mentally disabled but would come to arms and whine and huff about the word gay? It’s because there is a political agenda here.

 

I don’t have any problem if someone is adamant about their homosexuality. What I do have a problem with is the government not only sanctioning their behavior, but imposing their belief system on society, especially since it involves the right of people to respectfully hold opinions on subjects which involve human morality. The constitution was never meant to deal with moral issues, neither to promote nor restrict. That is the purpose of legislation. When government takes it upon itself to codify something which is contrary to society’s historical norms, government collides with freedom of conscience, the press, and speech.

 

When William Wallace in Braveheart died with the word freedom on his lips, that is precisely what he lived and died for. He knew (and so did we all) that he was still free as long as he could utter the word. If we cannot utter a word the way we want to say it, then we bury ourselves with it before we ourselves die. And that, my friend, is the most heartless, and gayest, thing of all!