Howie Carr over at the Herald has some free advice for anyone who feels compelled to complain about commuter rail service to MBTA General Manager and gay Republican Dan Grabauskas:

...never, ever send a series of easily traceable e-mails full of anti-gay slurs to a gay member of the Deval Patrick administration (even if he’s a gay Republican holdover from earlier GOP administrations).

While it's good advice as far as it goes (it's Howie Carr, people), it might not go quite far enough. 

You should probably not waste your time complaining to the T in the first place (as the young woman in this article found out the, um, hard way), but if you just can't help yourself, you should probably not only avoid using your work email, but also steer clear of slurs of any kind, regardless of the party affiliation of the recipient, or the administration for which he works, as they do tend to undermine your credibility and give people an excuse to ignore what might be genuine grievances in favor of expressing justified outrage at gratuitous insults.

Carr's column is satirical, of course, and his point that waste, graft, and incompetence are widespread throughout the bureaucracy is well-taken.  The offending emails were sent by a government functionary of one department to a government functionary of another.  But his observation that "nobody at the T seemed to care until [Mark Roberts, a $49,000-a-year paralegal at the state Department of Correction] brought up Grabauskas’ sexual orientation" implies that Grabauskas's complaint against Roberts is slightly frivolous, and that firing Roberts (who is on paid leave at the moment) would be unfair, especially considering the unrelated unfortunate case of Carl Stanley McGee, who, as the Globe reports, "was recently arrested in Florida and charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old male in a steam room at a $500-a-night Gulf Coast resort," and has apparently not yet been canned by the Patrick administration, but certainly deserves to be.

Carr weaves in so many unrelated plot lines here, you could be forgiven for not knowing what the hell his point is, and just enjoying the ride.  But amid the hilarity of bureaucratic degeneracy, there are some assumptions it's helpful to clarify. 

Neither Grabauskas's sexual orientation nor his party affiliation has anything to do with the fact that, as Roberts wrote "the evening Fram/Worc trains are late getting to Grafton at least 60% of the time.”  The fact that Grabauskas did not respond personally to Roberts' enlightening email also has nothing to do with his sexuality, although had Roberts included a hot cock-shot instead of taking the low-road and trash-talking the GM, he might have had better results.  But too late now.

There was certainly nothing frivolous in Grabauskas's pointing out that a government employee had become so unhinged he was firing off defamatory emails left and right, without any regard for the obvious consequences.   Grabauskas, who is certainly no friend of mine, is totally justified in his complaint here. And while Carr might be implying there's some political correctness at work, it's not PC to demand a modicum of civility in discourse.  Before anyone had ever heard of Political Correctness it was considered bad form to sputter defamatory or abusive epithets. 

The use of epithets in discourse discredits a person not because of any "impurity" of thought, because on some level, as a general rule, everyone hates the abstraction of society, which requires sacrifices of our selves.  It's human nature to look for the most obvious differences in others (either groups or individual members of groups that have come to represent for whatever reasons, the suppression of the individual will by society) to justify and express that hatred. 

Civility is not about not having evil thoughts.  Civility is about the necessity of suppressing them so that society, which is still preferable to "Man in the State of Nature," can function for us. Civility is a discipline.  And its lack, however expressed, is a red flag, indicating more general anti-social tendencies in an individual. 

The charge (however insidious) that complaints about abusive epithets are somehow frivolous, a result of political correctness gone mad, is merely convenient.  The political correctness that conservatives and reactionaries always decry when the slur in question suits them used to be called "manners".  There was never a time in civil discourse when name-calling was acceptable.  Defamation laws have been on the books since Roman times.  It has always been seen to indicate lack of discipline, decency and decorum.  And where there are laws, they have always come down on the side of civility in discourse.

The fact that homosexuality is out of the closet now does not make gays fair game for derogation, or fair targets of slurs.  And if you feel it's a grievous imposition not to hurl abuse at them, or at blacks, or Jews, or women, it says nothing about those you slander.  It could indicate, however, that a career in the public sector might not be for you.