Mediabistro.com posted the following snippet to their site yesterday:

The Garden Room was the hotbed of activity with an estrogen-fueled, invitation-only lunch hosted by Peggy Siegal for Arianna Huffington, with a head-spinning cross-section of media’s most powerful women. Joan Rivers summed up the afternoon thusly: “You’re better off out here! That was a roomful of bitches in there!”

Now, obviously Joan Rivers was trying to be funny. But is it really funny to call a prominent gathering of women from the media “a roomful of bitches”? What if a radio shock jock had said the same thing? Lets say Imus comes back after his two week suspension and utters such a phrase?

It would be lights out on his career for sure.

There would be outrage again and important people everywhere, especially politicians, piling on to condemn such a joke. Joan Rivers would tell us how she was “scarred for life,” by the remark and we would watch yet another shock jock’s career begin its death spiral.

What I’ve learned over the years, and especially over the past couple of days with this whole Imus flap, is that there’s a complicated heirarchy of privilege when it comes to the way people in this country define “free speech.” As a white conservative male, I reside on the lowest rung of the heirarchy, meaning, the rules for me are far more stringent than for anyone else.

Now, I understand there’s some reason for this given the history of this country and rights which were denied to women and some minorities for significant periods of time. I just don’t understand, though, how it is okay for women to demean themselves and for minorities to demean themselves ever. Why should it be okay for anyone to use race or gender slurs ever to insult someone else?

Comments made by Snoop Dogg underscore the stilted thinking when it comes to who in our society is allowed to demean whom when he said, “we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on MSNBC going hard on black girls… I will not let them mutha—–as say we in the same league as him.”

Snoop Dogg sounds more outraged that someone should compare his song lyrics and public statements (which are virtually identical if not worse) to an “old-ass” white guy who uses slang invented by the “gangsta rap” culture. I think the translation here is this:

What is free speech for me is not free speech for thee.

Do you disagree? Tell me how I’m wrong.