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The latest chapter in the Alec Baldwin saga is debating whether MSNBC is punishing him enough for his gay slur outburst. By not firing the salty Millard Fillmore doppelgänger, critics say the network is giving him a pass and sending a more troubling message: that gay people, and their rights, are inconsequential.
In the past week, Baldwin called a paparazzo a "cock-sucking fag" and was suspended from his talk show for two weeks.
One of Baldwin's and MSNBC's biggest critics has been CNN's Anderson Cooper. Cooper played a game of Bad Word Olympics with his guest Andrew Sullivan last night. Usually the game is played over wine among adults trying to be philosophical, in a conversation about race and civil rights. Nevertheless, Cooper made the point that the message being sent is that calling someone a "faggot" or "fag" still isn't considered as bad as calling them the n-word. And this is disrespectful to LGBT people. Cooper said:
If Alec Baldwin had yelled the N-word to that photographer or yelled an anti-Jewish slur against that photographer, it would be over. But the F-word is a word that kids are called in school every single day. Teachers often do nothing about it.
While Baldwin has given more people proof that he's a homophobic jerk, the bigger bigger problem that concerns Cooper is that society doesn't really care about gay people if they don't punish anti-gay slurs the same way they would the n-word and anti-Semitism.