id agree, you can't police that. Im not really sure its necessary. A personal insult is different.

Maybe you would be offended if someone insulted your wife or kids or something like that. But no rules or laws will stop some people being not very nice

Well i always thought 1/10 sounded a bit high

The underlying assumptions on here are also worryingly homophobic.

'It's a rough and tough game, so you can't be so sensitive as to worry about homophobia'

Seems to indicate an assumption that non-straight people (men especially) are (for some reason) particularly sensitive.

I'll say it again, if anyone came on here and said 'it's a rough and tough game so obviously it's ok for players to scream racist terms at each other' they'd get banned.

Just to be clear on this, and I say this only to test for consistency using similar situations, if cameras had picked up a player shouting "F**king n****r" at Monaghan, it would be fine because Monaghan isn't black and wouldn't be offended?

Its a pretty poor example though isn't it, because it would never happen. Let's be honest. So not something that can be regarded.

A nearer example is calling someone a big girl, when they are male. Would you find offence to that?

You wouldnt class someone talking as speech?

No, i havent said i do. But there is a difference between something being offensive and me personally being offended. Only in the same way that a rapist can't understand what it's like to be a victim of it, therefore a woman (largely) can't understand the actions/thinking of a rapist.

and nobody has accused him of that, so im not sure its relevance.

Quote: Gotcha "Its a pretty poor example though isn't it, because it would never happen. Let's be honest. So not something that can be regarded. A nearer example is calling someone a big girl, when they are male. Would you find offence to that?'" And yet it has happened. Your streak of wrongness continues. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 934543.stm the fact you can't tell the difference between 'big girl' and 'f'cking faggot' is ridiculous.

Quote: Gotcha "Its a pretty poor example though isn't it, because it would never happen. Let's be honest. So not something that can be regarded. A nearer example is calling someone a big girl, when they are male. Would you find offence to that?'" And yet it has happened. Your streak of wrongness continues. news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_l ... 934543.stm the fact you can't tell the difference between 'big girl' and 'f'cking faggot' is ridiculous.

I think this is largely true. If he had done that, then clearly 5 matches would be woefully inadequate.

Personally, I understand the ban for Hardaker, I see what they're trying to do in terms of sending out a strong message, but I think it's trying to sweep a bigger problem under the carpet. Hardaker has unwittingly become an emblem of a pretty pervasive, and largely unconscious homophobia. So in that regard, I don't personally believe that throwing the book at him was the answer.

In short, I don't believe his crime was so very great. It was a symptom of a wider issue, which is (and I'm honestly not trying to get into the finger pointing here) also revealed in the number of people who think this is not an issue because everyone does it and they don't really mean anything by it. Rather than criticize people who hold those views, I think there needs to be a lot of collective thinking done about the more subtle connotations of that and whether it leaves us in a position that we're really happy with.

I'd say classifying one single offensive word as "speech" is pushing it in the extremes



Not really a crime committed by a hatred/dislike/aversion towards the victim like homophobia is so that's a pretty poor comparison.



I know they haven't, I didn't say anybody has. Pointing out the contexts of things, but it either it went over your head or you just can't think of a response.

Why is it not realistic? People used to use inaccurate ethnic slurs all the time when I was a kid. The use of the term "paki" as an insult was pretty commonplace. I would argue that it's unlikely to happen now because people are more firmly programmed to think its unacceptable.

Would I find offence to it? No. I wasn't, to be clear, personally offended by the use of the word "faggot" either. I don't think I have to be to accept that other people could be.

Your example does probably wander into some of the "shades of grey" that (I think) ThePrinter alluded to earlier. There is a subtle difference, for instance, in the fact that calling him a girl is transparently enough not plausible that there is an element of farce. Michael Monaghan clearly could feasibly be gay. It is vanishingly unlikely that he is a girl. The main impact of this being in the likelihood that it would be used in quite the pejorative way that the word "faggot" was used in this case. There was nothing particularly jovial and banter-ish about this incident, if we're being honest. But personally I wouldn't use it in a very public sphere, and I wouldn't use it at work. "Girl" is also not actually a pejorative term, whereas "faggot" clearly is. Surely you would agree that there is an important difference in that? I'm not even sure I know a pejorative term for girl.

In light of that, perhaps "jew" or, more accurately, one of its less pleasant colloquial synonyms might be a better example. if Hardaker had abused Monaghan by calling him a "f**king yid" would that be OK because Monaghan isn't Jewish?

No, it was a black man to a black man. You know, like earlier on when we heard it was ok because sometimes gay people use it.

"The words were just in the back of my head and they were just words I automatically use with people I hang out with, but not in a racist way," Swap the word 'racist' for 'homophobic' and that is your fanboy defence of Hardaker.

You do realise that speech means the vocalized form of human language yes? Using one word is 'speech'.

This is different from A Speech. Nobody is pretending that Hardaker is out there giving Homophobic speeches at rallys or anything.

Erm.......I'll leave the specific list of wrongs in that sentence well alone.

Well it was a rubbish straw man. It didnt even have a hat.

This is perhaps easily said as I don't have any strong personal interest in this - I have gay friends but none of them would be offended by this incident, but I think we have to be able to have this debate without name calling and finger pointing.

As with racism, I think the competing views need to be aired, discussed and debated. As soon as people can't raise points like those being raised by ThePrinter and Gotcha (among others) on here (and they are views that have similarly lucid counterparts in racist/anti-racist discourse) without being branded ignorant or as supporting or being part of the prejudice we're talking about, we start creating more problems.

It's important that people can talk about these things. That has to be within reasonable boundaries, but I don't think anything on this thread has stepped outside those boundaries.