So Ozzie Guillen got mad at newspaper columnist Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times, and this is what he said:
What a piece of s*** he is, f****** fag.
Guillen defended his use of the term “fag” with this:
I don’t have anything against those people. In my country, you call someone something like that and it is not the same as it is in this country.
According to Guillen, in his country, “fag” refers to cowardice, not homosexuality. It’s almost too easy, but let’s go ahead and pick this argument apart.
Point #1: As of January 20, 2006, Ozzie’s country is the United States of America. So in “my country,” fag refers to homosexuals.
Point #2: Ozzie Guillen signed with the San Diego Padres in 1980, when he was 16 years old. He is now 42 years old. For the past 26 years, Ozzie Guillen has lived and worked in America for at least eight months out of every year. That is a minimum of 208 months — more than 17 full years — that Ozzie has lived in the U.S. I understand that there is a learning curve and all when it comes to English, but I think 17 years is long enough to learn the basics about what is and isn’t offensive.
Point #3: Speaking of English, here’s the most basic hole in Ozzie’s argument: “fag” is an English word. The word means nothing in Spanish. If you go to Venezuela and call someone a fag, they won’t think you are questioning their courage — they will wonder what you are talking about! Ozzie Guillen learned that word in America, and if he didn’t make an effort to learn the definition, that’s his problem, not ours. Willful ignorance is a symptom of, not an excuse for, idiocy.
The bottom line is this: Greg Couch is right, and Ozzie Guillen should be suspended for his remarks. He is an idiot. He injects heroin into the veins of starving children in Africa and then kills their parents. (Oh, by the way, in my country, “injects heroin into the veins of starving children in Africa and then kills their parents” means “is a moron.”)
Get a life. FAG is a word. People are too F’ing uptight.
Yes, “fag” is a word. It is a word that is offensive, even if only because it is intended to be offensive. There may be nothing inherently offensive about the word, but the fact that it is almost always used pejoratively makes it offensive, no matter what you say. And my gripe with Ozzie Guillen’s use of the word wasn’t so much for the offensiveness, because Jay Mariotti isn’t even a part of the group intended to be offended by it — my gripe was that Ozzie’s use of the word was immature and childish, and Ozzie should know better, no matter how many “I don’t know English” excuses he makes.