Bad language

As was pointed out in a recent post below, the case of George, the 10-year-old whose parents were shocked to receive a visit from the police after he called another boy ‘gay’ in an email, is indeed disturbing. But what is the proper response to this kind of incident? We can cry ‘police state!’ and remonstrate about ‘PC gone mad’. We can also be sensible and point to the waste of police time. We can even be more nuanced and take issue with the policing, in the place of the parenting, of children. But that misses the point.

This is a free speech issue at heart. And it’s more complicated than it appears.

As a way of clarifying the matter, let’s compare George’s case with a hypothetical ‘hate crime’: a gay man is bullied, perhaps even assaulted, during the course of which he is called ‘gay boy’ in a derogatory manner. In such a case, it would be foolish to focus on the aggressor’s use of the word ‘gay’. Firstly there is the criminal issue to deal with and then, more importantly (socially speaking), there is the real underlying problem of homophobia. A case such as this would warrant our moral condemnation and a political argument against homophobia, not speech codes against the use of the word ‘gay’.

On the other hand, you have little George in Cheshire. In his ‘bullying’ of the other boy, his use of the word ‘gay’ is purely incidental. It bears about as much relation to homophobic assault as the fumigation of your house to deal with a pest problem does to Saddam Hussein’s attack on Halabja (i.e. they both used gas). This emphasises the real problem with the above responses to this case: they all work on the assumption that the boy is at fault and that the very use of the word ‘gay’ is wrong.

Leaving aside the question of bullying, what is there to suggest that George’s use of the word ‘gay’ is problematic? Do we think he is a homophobe, that he’ll grow up to attack gay men? As I’ve argued before, this relatively recent tendency to endow words with greater meaning than that which was intended by the speaker draws undue attention to the capacity of language to cause offence, rather than language’s paramount importance in permitting rational argument. The consequence of taking issue with the language we use amongst ourselves is the legitimisation of third party intervention, which in this particular case seems so utterly preposterous.

Alex Hochuli