As a gay columnist, I am placed in an awkward position. I am more than capable of writing about topics that don’t relate to the same-sex community, but at the same time, I feel a strong sense of guilt for not responding when I think anti-gay rhetoric is printed on the pages of The Daily Illini.

On Thursday, a columnist wrote a piece that attempted to glorify discrimination. He crossed a number of lines, such as suggesting that Democrats don’t truly love this country. I was most concerned, however, by this columnist’s attack on a specific minority group: gays and lesbians. Now, I can stomach statements like, “America has spoken, and we don’t want gay marriage.” What I will not accept is blatant degradation.

The columnist quotes a New York resident who said we need to have respect for “people with different lifestyles,” which I can only guess refers partly to gays and lesbians. I would not be surprised, because the columnist has an infatuation with using the same-sex community to make his digs.

In response to the proposition that we should respect people like gays and lesbians, he said, “Keep the freak show on Fifth Avenue.”

That’s adorable. Go grab your crotch and brag about how you just wrote “a friggin’ awesome piece” to your friends. I wouldn’t be surprised at all. What does surprise me, though, is how inconsistent organizations can be in responding to bigotry. The reaction seems to depend on which minority group is being offended.

Most people who regularly read the DI know that Matt Vroom was disciplined by his editors for a comic strip he drew that was perceived to be anti-Semitic. Though Vroom didn’t directly say, “I hate Jews,” there still was a degree of intolerance being depicted, at least in the eyes of many readers.

Likewise, the columnist I am speaking of didn’t come out and say, “Gay people are freak shows,” and perhaps that’s not what he meant. But it is easy to see how it could be perceived that way. Everyone knows that big cities have a higher population of homosexuals, and by “keeping the freak show on Fifth Avenue,” he is presumably saying that we don’t need tolerance of the same-sex community to spread to more rural parts of the country.

Like it or not, the bigotry and ignorance in this column is just as evident as it was in Vroom’s comic. Drawing a comic referencing a big-nosed Jewish banker is hardly more offensive than implying that homosexuals are freak shows, but you never would know that based on the response of the editors and the lack of reaction to the columnist’s piece (or piece of s***, to be more precise). Letters of condemnation flooded in after Vroom’s comic strip was run, and he was briefly suspended from his position. However, the only responses I saw to the anti-gay remark in Thursday’s opinions section were letters with blanket statements like, “Hey, gays aren’t so bad.”

That’s not enough. If students hold some sort of town-hall meeting and decided that calling gays and lesbians “freak shows” is acceptable, they reserve the right to have that opinion. But it is not the job of a newspaper to make inconsistent judgments about the bigotry expressed by its employees. Everyone knows that if this columnist would have suggested that Jews, blacks or Asians are “freak shows,” he would be promptly punished, just as Vroom was for his anti-Semitic drawing.

In my opinion, the remarks found in last week’s column would be better suited for an extreme right-wing publication like The Orange and Blue Observer, not a student newspaper that prides itself on tolerance. Gays and lesbians still are a minority in this country. They deserve the same level of respect that our student newspaper has aggressively shown toward the Jewish population on campus when it was offended.

Jon Monteith is a sophomore in LAS. His column runs Tuesdays. He can be reached at [email protected].