Ann Coulter was on a roll Thursday when she joined John Stossel at a Students for Liberty Conference in Washington. In less than 60 seconds, Coulter managed to insult Libertarians, liberals, and the LGBT community. Her tirade elicited shocked expressions, head shaking, looks of disbelief, and, ultimately, booing. When Stossel switched their topic to gay marriage and asked, “Why can’t gays get married like straights do?” Coulter responded, “Um, well they can. They have to marry a member of the opposite sex.” Coulter has proven that she’s more than willing to capitalize on every bit of negative attention she can garner, so her remarks are not as surprising as the fact that anyone would even ask her to speak at their conference.
Coulter accused Libertarians of “sucking up to liberals when there are big fights we need to be having…” and said that all they care about is legalizing pot. When Stossel asked her to address the drug war, she gave an exasperated and mocking groan of “Libertarians and pot!” and proceeded to say, “Look, this is why people think Libertarians are pussies. We’re living in a country that is 70% Socialist. The government takes 60% of your money. They’re taking care of your healthcare, of your pensions, they are telling you who you can hire, what the regulations can be and you wanna suck up to your little liberal friends and say ‘Oh, but we wanna legalize pot.’ You know, if you were a little more manly, you’d tell the liberals what your position on employment discrimination is. How bout’ that?”
Though Ann Coulter has a more than adequate history of spewing hate speech, the things that come out of her mouth never cease to shock and disturb. After 9-11, Coulter attacked the widows of men who died in the World Trade Center because she was angry that some spoke out against the Bush administration, and Coulter believed it was unfair that they were eliciting sympathy. She felt the 9-11 widows were attention-seeking, liberal spokespeople rather than victims. “These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9-11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attack only happened to them. They believe the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently denouncing Bush was part of the closure process. These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by griefparrazies. I have never seen people enjoying their husband’s death so much.” She also referred to the women as “harpies” and asked, “How do we know their husbands weren’t planning to divorce” them?
In 2010, Coulter had to cancel her scheduled tour of three Canadian universities. Students gathered outside of the University of Ottawa hall where Coulter was prepared to speak, and successfully forced organizers to cancel the event. The backlash there resulted from a remark that Coulter made to a Muslim college student during her first event on that tour, at the University of Western Ontario. The young woman was responding to comments that Coulter had previously made regarding invading Islamic countries, killing their leaders, and converting their citizens to Christianity, and another instance where Coulter said that she had reviewed the civil rights lawsuits against airlines so that she could choose to fly with the one that had subjected Arabs to the most “egregious discrimination,” and also suggested Arabs could use “flying carpets” for transport.
The student, Fatima Al-Dhaher, asked Coulter, “First of all, as a 17 year-old student of this university, Muslim, should I be converted to Christianity? Second of all, since I don’t have a magic carpet, what other modes do you suggest?” With her customary quick wit and class, Coulter told the student to “take a camel.” This comment came after Coulter had been politely encouraged by University of Ottawa VP Academic and Provost, François Houle, to review what defines hate speech under Canadian law. He was even nice enough to point out to Coulter that under the Criminal Code of Canada, “promoting hatred against any identifiable group would not only be considered inappropriate, but could in fact lead to criminal charges.” Naturally the attention-hungry Coulter responded to his letter with outrage, saying that Houle was “threatening to criminally prosecute” her before she “even set foot in the country.”
Alisha Mims is a writer and researcher for Ring of Fire.