Doubling Down on Prejudice

Over the years my position on free speech and its collision with political correctness has evolved fairly drastically. While I can say that I've held fairly steadfast to an absolutist conception of free speech, my views on reactionary speech and political correctness have more drastically shifted; moving from an almost complete excoriation of political correctness to a much wider embrace of it...and finally to something somewhat in between. I no longer see the contention between freedom of speech and our general duties of beneficence towards one another that I used to. And so I still hold sympathies on both sides of what seems like a common political schism.

All of that being said, there's an argument that I have heard one too many times lately (from defenders of free speech) that seems to not only ring hollow, but actually self-incriminating as well. It's an argument that gets pulled up when talking about the "correctness" (political or otherwise) of using what may be commonly seen as a prejudicial slur to excoriate (or even joke with) other people for whom the term would not literally apply. A common example would be a group of men who ridicule someone within the group for "chickening out" on something by calling them "gay". Obviously, many in the homosexual community would find that kind of behavior pretty offensive. What's almost just as offensive is this argument that I've seen people use to defend it.

The argument goes something like this:

"Well is it really that offensive? I mean, think about it. I'm not actually calling him gay. I'm just using it because that's what you say when you want to annoy someone."

Surprisingly enough, this line of argument is bought by a pretty large swath of people. And they seem fairly unaware of how they are clearly doubling down on the initial mistake. Let me flesh out that response by re-wording it, just to see if the issue can be teased out by those who might not see it:

"Oh, come on, I'm not really insulting him. I'm not saying he's actually gay. I mean, if I was, then that would really be an insult. But I'm not doing that."

It's really amazing how many people I've heard try to torpedo themselves into the clear by anchoring themselves to that line of thought. For anyone who is still unclear on the issue at hand, the error is not in the false identification of someone as being gay, but in the false identification of being gay as being something lesser. Chances are that if you're missing this finer point, you're probably missing the point of the argument against prejudiced terminology more generally.