Andrew Sullivan hits me for having a "spasm of liberal guilt" in response to Rinku Sen's comparison of "illegal immigrant" to "homosexual."
I actually have no problem with the word "homosexual" and use it as a neutral term all the time. Again, the noun-adjective issue is more important to me. To call someone "a gay" is different than calling someone "gay." And not ever being able to say something lame is gay is so gay.
But this is a complex issue. There's the difference between saying something and writing it. There's the place and the time and the speaker/writer. Language is infinitely complex, context matters, agency matters. For me to use the word homosexual is different that a straight person using it. When Eric Cartman calls someone a "faggot", it's different than Ann Coulter whipping up a CPAC crowd. And gays, like other minorities also have more lee-way to say things others don't, like the ironic use of "a gay", or my conversational references to "the AIDS" or, occasionally the adjective "AIDSy", because it is self-evident that we are not trying to be homophobic any more than is necessary, but that we are being self-mocking and funny.
So Sullivan's case for why "homosexual" is a neutral term in this context is to bring up a bunch of examples in which anti-gay slurs are used ironically, which basically proves the opposite point.
The reason anti-gay rights advocates like to use "homosexual" is because it evokes being gay as a clinical condition -- which makes it easier for people like Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck to compare being gay to alcoholism. For them it's a disease, it's a disorder, and so it must be referred to in scientific-sounding language. Communities reappropriating slurs against them is probably as old as the use of language as a tool for oppression, but that doesn't actually happen if the term is actually "neutral" as we use it in contemporary language, not as it is itself defined. Their use isn't subversive or even ironic otherwise.
Again there's an element of agency in being in the U.S. illegally -- at least for most people who are here under those circumstances -- than there is in being gay, so it's not the same. But Sullivan's argument for why "illegal immigrant" is a neutral term actually suggests the opposite, and it doesn't at all address Dana McCourt's argument for why the term "illegal immigrant" blurs key matters of fact.
Like I said before, I'm not totally convinced of Sen's point here, but Sullivan's response is unpersuasive, mostly because he seems to be railing against political correctness in general, not about whether or not the term "illegal immigrant" is accurate or actually "neutral."
