[UPDATE: The Log Cabinettes put out a response. See it below the fold.]

I just wanted to toss in my two cents on this one.

Ann Coulter is easy.  She’s a buffoon and a loose cannon who should be marginalized by conservatives. No one should be surprised when she opens her pie hole and “faggot” drops out. This is her shock-jock-political-chick schtick. It’s sold a lot of books, gotten her on the boob-tube, and allowed her to travel around the country earning a living speaking to horny young Republican Yellow Elephant frat boys.

She was a useful tool for the Republicans for a while, but, as Tim Hardaway and the Snickers folks learned, blatant homophobia isn’t selling like it used to. Coulter’s remarks are simply stale bad theatre and it should have been treated as such.

The auto-generated condemnation statement by HRC is a given; no news here. This incident should have presented an easy opportunity for the DNC and all of the Democratic presidential candidates to not just condemn Coulter’s comments, but to ask aloud why she feels compelled to use homophobic commentary to make a political point and how it directly affects gays and lesbians in the real world.

To address what Coulter’s remarks mean on anything besides the superficial level we are seeing — and to generate real discussion about homophobia in the political debate, I guess we have to look elsewhere.

As I was mulling about what else to say on this topic, this popped in my mailbox (see after the flip)…Click to enlarge:

The above says all we need to know about the continuing inability and lack of desire of Dems to move past 2004 (HRC’s Joe Solomonese has no problem pointing this out about Republicans — see Eva’s post), but what does that Edwards e-release do to condemn homophobia?

Nothing. It doesn’t even mention “gay,” “lesbian,” or “homophobia.” It doesn’t point out that Coulter’s use of “faggot” as a slur on Edwards is also what spills from the lips of the kind of people who beat up a gay man for wearing pink pants, or murder a 72-year-old gay man by slamming him with a metal pipe.

Lesson for the Edwards camp: if you can’t directly address the hate fomented by Coulter in light of the public backlash felt by Tim Hardaway and M&M Mars, you haven’t progressed beyond 2004 either. All you have to do is Google a few seconds to find incidents of blatant bigotry and violence like the ones I mentioned above. That is the real price LGBT citizens pay when the new F-bomb is validated at a political conference of this size and scope.

Why say this:

Coulter’s resorting to the classic right-wing strategy of riling up hate to smear a progressive champion.

…when you can’t even spend one paragraph explaining what hate is being riled up? Certainly if she had belted out “nigger,” we would have seen releases go out mentioning “racism” and black people.

I can’t even begin to address the fact that the Edwards campaign used this as an e-fundraising tactic right out of the box. It cheapens the message beyond all reason. This required a separate response not tied to an ATM request.

If you’re a homo, the message from Dems is that we’re still invisible (see Dean’s statement), the crazy granny in the attic, and only the granny’s nearly feeble caretaker is allowed to say anything — and even HRC never mentions gays or lesbians at all in its release (outside of its irrelevant boilerplate at the end). Even our advocacy organization couldn’t find a paragraph to place Coulter’s comments into context of the larger issue of homophobia.

Hell, instead of the tired righteous comments, simply denigrate and marginalize Coulter with humor. Ask her to elaborate:

Is there something wrong with being gay, Ann? Is that why you want to call John Edwards a faggot? Does being against the war mean you’re a pansy? If so, that would mean a much larger slice of the demographic pie is gay than I imagined — and the numbers are growing every day.

Do you truly believe that this is acceptable to all those gay Republicans sitting there at the Conservative Political Action Conference listening to you?

Where are the Log Cabinettes on this? I see no press release on that web site, sorry to say. The GOP has been filled with professionally closeted gays at the highest levels of the party and this is their problem to solve.

The Republicans simply can’t take themselves off the hook on the matter — they’ve used their toy Coulter as their bigoted id, keeping their hands clean as she says what too many of them feel but dare not say. Glenn is right, those who have championed Coulter in the past can’t be taken seriously now that she’s embarrassed them publicly on this one:

The people feigning upset over those matters are either active participants in, or passive aiders and abetters of, a political movement that, at its very core — not at its fringes — knowingly and continuously embraces the most wretched and obvious bigotry and bloodthirsty authoritarianism. They love Ann Coulter — and therefore continue to make her a venerated part of their political events — because she provides an outlet, a venting ground, for the twisted psychological impulses and truly hateful face that drives the entire pro-Bush, right-wing spectacle.

***

UPDATE: The The Log Cabinettes awakened and put up this sleepy response, and it doesn’t address the larger issue of homophobia:

Log Cabin Republicans President Patrick Sammon made the following statement about pundit Ann Coulter’s remarks at CPAC:

“Ann Coulter should be embarrassed by her anti-gay remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference.  Coulter’s words are not worthy of this event or our nation’s political dialogue.  Intelligent people engage in political debates using ideas not insults.  Unfortunately, she has made a career out of saying increasingly outrageous things just to garner headlines and shill her books.  Ann Coulter is more interested in soundbites than substance and she has become more ridiculous than relevant.  She obviously has no shame.”