As if to remind us that all that talk about wiping the slate clean and starting the new year fresh is bullshit, there have been a whole spate of fantastically horrible stories to bring us all out of that fresh faced stupor that usually leaves January like a holiday hangover: unproductive, groggy – and once the credit card bills show up – full of headaches.

The one I want to concentrate on now is the Seattle Ricin Letters. Yes, yes, it’s horrible. It’s terrorism, plain an simple, it’s anti-business, it’s anti-gay, whatever. Smarter folks than I am have covered the news angle. The specific article I’d like to talk about is this one. Dan Savage has done a typically great job laying out why he thinks what he thinks about the guy who wrote the letters. I agree on some points but not others, but since Savage gets more hate mail in a week than I will in my whole life, I’ll acquiesce the point to him. But I’m not interested in the article itself so much as the comments. Apparently, in order to hate gays and not be a religious nut, you must be, first and foremost, fat, and ugly.

Now, I’m a realist. I don’t think for a moment that these people honestly believe this. When you are confronted with a threat, the natural group instinct is to reduce the overall anxiety over the threat. There are many ways to do this – You can rally to the cause, you can make great speeches, you can come together as a community, you can pray, you can build a multibillion dollar wing of your government with the sole mission to destroy the document which is the foundation of your liberty, you can write about it. But the primary mode in online forums, since there is no physicality, is to demean the threat in writing. If someone comes onto a forum and presents a view that is antithetical to the group, typically you reach a Godwin’s Law situation very quickly, as the discussion devolves from point-counter-point to the natural monkey-fling-poop derision festival as the group status quo asserts its dominance. After this dominance is established, and the threat is sufficiently demeaned, then the group usually begins to quibble internally about the perjoratives that were used (see comment 19), but the essence of the group ethos comes in those initial meet-the-threat moments.

So what is the lesson here? Apparently, when pressed to come up with the worst insult to apply to another gay person, the gay (male) community chooses “fat”, “unattractive”, and “unclean”. It’s interesting (though not terribly surprising).