Acceptable slurs

Steve Allen would have loved the letters page in the newspaper I work for.

The first "Tonight Show" host had a routine where he would don a ridiculous wig and read actual letters to the editor, doing his best to replicate the spittle-flecked rage in the tone of the original. Our letters page publishes many such letters.

The policy for the page, such as it is, seems to be that it's a kind of freewheeling marketplace of ideas, where no argument, no position, no opinion is unwelcome. The one exception, I thought, was that foul language and slurs would not be permitted.

Apparently, I was wrong about that.

Elizabeth Robinson of Newark, Del., was upset by an article the paper had run about this symposium at the University of Delaware on the Victorian playwrights and poets Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who wrote together under the pseudonym "Michael Field." (Their rather complicated lives can still created heated controversy — the aunt and niece also seem to have been lovers — which is part of why UD decided to have such a symposium.)

Here is what Ms. Robinson wrote and the paper published:

"It made me sick to think The News Journal wrote about an aunt and niece who were lovers. Marriages are being performed left and right for homos. What is our world coming to? Who really cares about this aunt and her niece?

"This thing about gays adopting kids or impregnating lesbians so they can raise a family is far-fetched. I wouldn't want two fathers or two mothers if I was a kid, and I don't think the Good Lord condones it either."

The cover story of the same day's paper was a wonderful profile and interview of Littleton Mitchell, a pioneering civil rights activist from Delaware City now in his eighties. In telling his own story, Mitchell repeats the ugly epithet he often heard during his civil rights campaigns. The newspaper decided, rightly, that this word falls under the category of "obscenities, profanities, vulgarities," about which the AP Stylebook instructs:

If a full quote that contains profanity, obscenity or vulgarity cannot be dropped but there is not compelling reason for the offensive language, replace letters of an offensive word with a hyphen. The word damn, for example, would become d— or —-.

Sunday's paper censored the racial epithet, but left intact the antigay epithet just a few pages later.

I'm not sure what we're supposed to glean from that decision, but the standard does not seem consistent.

I mention here, merely as a point of information, that on the very same letters page on which Robinson's epithet appears there is also a gray box in the upper right corner that invites more letters to the editor. It even features a convenient link to this page, at the bottom of which is a form through which online readers can submit such a letter as easily as clicking a mouse.

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Unlike the angry correspondent above, President Bush doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would use antigay slurs* (although this is pretty funny). In that all important heart of his, it doesn't seem like George W. Bush has a whole lot against gay people.

The New York Times' Elizabeth Bumiller makes just this point in an article Monday:

Mr. Bush's friends say that … the president is quite comfortable with gays. Laura Bush, when asked in a recent interview by The New York Times if she and her husband had gay friends, easily replied: "Sure, of course. Everyone does."

Although the president's behavior might reinforce the view among his critics that he was acting cynically when he endorsed the amendment, the fact is that he has a record of tolerance in personal situations.

To which Matthew Yglesias ably responds:

The president has a record of tolerance in personal situations and, by all accounts, this record is sincere. Nevertheless, he's decided to throw the weight of the White House behind behind a major anti-gay initiative. It's that record of personal tolerance — combined with the fact that the president and Dick Cheney took a different, more tolerant stance during the 2000 campaign — that makes it so hard to believe that the president is undertaking this effort in good faith. The president seems to like gays and lesbians just fine, only not so much as he likes boosting his own re-election prospects. That's what I'd call "acting cynically."

Yes. And I would add that it is also difficult to believe Bush is "undertaking this effort in good faith" when one considers the near-impossible task of getting this particular constitutional amendment passed. Rudimentary headcounts in the Senate show that it's already D.O.A. — falling well short of the two-thirds majority it would need to pass there. Pretending that such a dead-end proposal is a worthy endeavor is, it seems, another example of "acting cynically."

* On the other hand, you can take the boy out of the frat, but you can't always take the frat out of the boy. In the wrong peer group — say one of Dick Cheney's male-bonding hunting trips — Bush might just chime in, if that's what everybody else was doing.