Labor Secretary Hilda Solis uses gay-baiting slur in public. (Anti Tea Party)

It’s not turning into a good year for the Obama administration – in fact, it’s not been a good administration for the Obama administration – but I think that this is hardly an excuse for a Cabinet level official to use low-rent sexual epithets in public:

At the Florida Democratic Party State Convention over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis insulted members of the Tea Party, referring to the activists as “teab[*]ggers.” Teab[*]gger is a pejorative term used to refer to a certain sexual act. Liberal talk show hosts such as Rachel Maddow brought the phrase into the mainstream in 2009, using it as a tongue-in-cheek insult.

As reported by Tallahassee Democrat and Sunshine State News, after voicing her support for large federal programs, Solis warned, “I’ll be darned if I’m going to set that aside now because a few teab[*]ggers want to somehow muzzle my voice,” Solis said.

(Sanitizing mine.)

I’ve always been somewhat cynically amused at how liberal/Democrats/progressives could just somehow tell that when, say, the word ‘macaca’ was used it was clearly meant as a racial slur; but that the enthusiastic use of the term ‘teab*gger’ had no homophobic connotations at all.

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