My Google Reader Feed (which I read using the iPad and iPhone app, Feedler)  was full today with snippets about Willow Palin’s gay slur, and how Gay tea baggers are defending her. Yes, I used “gay tea bagger” intentionally, and I’ll write about that later. But in this post, I want to stick with my base question: Do we love homophobes? Or perhaps a better question, is this: Have we learned nothing from the recent increase in gay teen suicides and the anti-bullying efforts?

I think we haven’t, learned much that is. I think too many within the Gay Press, the blogosphere, and social media in general, just love the word homophobe. The goal is to find a label so vile and nasty and othered, that people will be embarrassed, ashamed, hated, or whatever when that term is applied. And if that strategy sounds familiar, it ought to. It is the exact same strategy that the Far Right uses against Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender people. I guess we learned that lesson pretty well.

A case can be made, perhaps, if you work really hard, that the use of gay slurs is a product of homophobia, many many steps removed. Like if you drop a pebble into a pond, and then watch the ripple it causes. Ten feet or twenty feet away from where the pebble entered the water, there is still a ripple. Small, but still a little connected to the initial causation. Gay slurs, like Willow Palin’s is like that.But this homophobia is an institutionalized homophobia. Actions (and words are actions) rooted in a deep and underlying sense that it is acceptable to attack someone with a gay slur, are just that actions, and violent in a way because their purpose is to cause some damage. People who try and harm others are bullies more than they are homophobes.

But I started this post with a question worth going back to: Do we love homophobes? Where the notion of “we” is the collective LGBT communities.  I think we do. I think we want there to be homophobes and if we can’t really find them, we labels others as homophobes, because it gives us someone to other, and blame and we can own our place as their victim. It sets up an us vs them state, and that is a place we know how to operate from.

So, check it out and tell me what you think. Here is some story about the Willow’s words: http://www.newser.com/story/105498/willow-palin-rips-moms-critic-with-gay-slurs.html. And then, there are these gay tea baggers who say she isn’t a homophobe: http://www.tmz.com/2010/11/17/willow-palin-sarah-palin-goproud-tea-party-republicans-conservative-homophobic-gay/

When it really doesn’t matter if she is or isn’t. Using gay slurs like that is unacceptable. Period.

I wanted to say more about gay tea baggers.  Another post, OK? See you then.