you know, there's a difference between verbal abuse and assault. drunken yapyap, though no doubt stupid and annoying, ought not to be a crime. i'd arrest him for being done up like that, though. there have to be limits. if the french have banned headscarves, then a fortiori they have banned dior headscarves, as well they should.
now the idea that everything he said was arbitrarily caused by substance abuse and had nothing to do with his actual opinions or identity - repeated everywhere by his defenders - strikes me as unlikely to be true, exactly. there are a lot of things you might say when you're drunk, a profuse panoply of possible prepossessions and prejudices to parade. slurred nonsense is an infinite universe. why this instead of something else? prescription drugs and mojitos don't cause anti-semitism. or if they do, maybe that needs to be on the label.
the fashion world deploys a rhetoric of profound human liberation achieved through extremely expensive clothing and cake makeup: gaga ideology, we might say. (that's why this sort of thing is particularly difficult for the industry to face up to squarely.) there's no doubt whatever that galliano had the courage to be extremely gay (in, we might add, an atmosphere where i imagine it's difficult to be anything else, in which you might actually find closeted straight people); but that doesn't mean that fashion really does set you free or overcome various bigotries.
