“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” I’m pretty sure that a person has to be only a few years old to learn how untrue this statement really is. I remember getting teased in elementary school for, among other things, my brown-bagged lunch or hand-me-down clothes, and then desperately wanting not to feel hurt so that the proverb could be true. It only took a short time for me to realize that it is, in fact, words that can cause the most damage.

I recently loaned a good friend my copy of Queer as Folk, the Showtime series about the relationships between a group of gay men in Pittsburg. As my friend and I talked about the storylines early on in the series, I brought up the one centering on a character who goes to a church group seeking conversion therapy to become heterosexual. In a confrontational scene, the man’s best friend says that God loves everything God makes, including “every faggot.”

My Christian upbringing coupled with the fairly negative coming out experience I had with my parents gives this storyline a deeper meaning than someone who watches it without so much emotional baggage. That being said, I found the scene moving because of what it is proclaimed that God loves; my friend, however, didn’t find it as poignant, especially since the character used the word “faggot.”

That’s a tough word to get around, and certainly one that people like to throw about as if it were a stick or stone. People like Grey’s Anatomy’s Isaiah Washington (who subsequently went to rehab for “behavioral issues”) and Ann Coulter (who should go to rehab) have famously used the word faggot as an insult, and Fred Phelps has practically made an empire out of his God Hates Fags group that, among other things, pickets military funerals and gay pride events.

There are, of course, gay people who go the other way with it and own the word or use it as a rallying cry. One of my coworkers relayed the story of coming out to his military-trained father and looking him in the eye and saying, “Are you going to hit your faggot son?” Perhaps this helps to explain one of the reasons why I like the aforementioned conversion therapy storyline: In that scene, a gay character uses a word that for years has been slung derogatorily at homosexuals to describe God’s love for everything in creation. It asks, “How could God hate something God created?” and thus turns on its head Phelps’s God Hates Fags mantra. It may simply be a scene from a television show, but because of the words that are used, it creates a powerful moment of realization for those of us who have been hated, told to change, and cast off to hell as a result of being gay.

I quickly got to thinking about the power that words have in our society and the way our perceptions of reality are indicated by the words we choose to employ. Think, for example, about the abortion debate. People who support abortion rights deem themselves “pro-choice” and ground their argument on legal footing, while those who do not support abortion call themselves “pro-life” and come at the issue from a morals-based stance. In much the same way, gays and lesbians historically have been denied the right to marriage. Although many people support civil unions, which offer many of the same legal protections that married couples enjoy, many more people are hesitant to label those relationships as marriage. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama opposes gay marriage because of the religious overtones that word has, even though he supports providing same-sex couples with the legal rights of marriage, just under the banner of “civil unions.”

Explosive political issues aside, think about how specific words have impacted you. Remember back to the first time a brother or sister called you a name, or when a classmate made fun of you for not knowing the answer to a teacher’s question. Words can certainly inspire good, but they also have immense power to demean someone or something. The adage should really be: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me.”

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