Missing the point

When a few classmates razzed Rebekah Rice about her Mormon upbringing with questions such as, "Do you have 10 moms?" she shot back: "That's so gay."

Those three words landed the high school freshman in the principal's office and resulted in a lawsuit that raises this question: When do playground insults used every day all over America cross the line into hate speech that must be stamped out?

It's really missing the point when two insults are thrown out and only one is considered a problem. If you asked me which is worse, insulting someone over their religion or saying "That's so gay," I would view the first as more in need of punishment.

I can remember us kids using "gay" as an insult long before any of us had any idea what that meant. Well, we knew that gay had two definitions, happy and homosexual, because that was in the dictionary, but at that age, we didn't know what homosexuality meant.

I also found it humorous to catch an unabashed liberal, now a reporter for the Boston Globe, using "that's gay" in a similar manner to the girl above.