Valerie Bertinelli Fans Are Applauding This Pro-LGBTQ+ Stance
If words were bullets, we'd all be dead by now — all of us Twitter users, anyway. The culture wars rage nonstop on the social media platform, and since the attacks are non-lethal, they show no signs of abating. Only the worst tweeters, including those who glorify or incite real-world violence, don't get to engage on Twitter, as the platform's blog explained.
Witness October 27: another day in the Twitter wars. One skirmish featured a soldier with a large following: cookbook author and Food Network host Valerie Bertinelli. Actually, this particular fight was started by another author, with nearly as many Twitter followers as Bertinelli: one Gad Saad, whose latest book "The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense" just came out in paperback (via Regnery).
OK, Saad wasn't necessarily trying to start a fight. He only got on Twitter to relate a story about his wife's encounter with a gender-ambiguous server at a coffee shop. But Saad just wrote a whole book to argue that political correctness threatens rational debate and freedom of speech. He should have known he was dropping a bomb on the Twittersphere.
Valerie Bertinelli schools anti-political correctness author on proper pronoun use
Gad Saad's Twitter thread on October 27 related the experience his wife had at their local cafe. She became "frozen in fear," Saad said, over the possibility that she might use the wrong pronoun to refer to a server at the cafe. "Therein lies the problem with this language policing," Saad said in the tweet. "It takes perfectly natural social situations and in the quest to not offend an extraordinarily small minority, ... everyone is walking on egg shelves." (They prefer to be called "eggshells," but that's beside the point.)
Valerie Bertinelli was among many who fired back on Twitter. She had a very basic language lesson for Saad: "'Hi' 'Pardon me' 'How are you this morning?' 'May I please have' 'Thank you' — language you can use without worrying about someone's pronouns," Bertinelli tweeted, adding, "But you don't really care about that, do you? You're just looking for targets, then you can cry victim when people come to their defense."
Fans applauded Bertinelli's stand in support of the LGBTQ+ community. "I heart you. Well said," @JellenScott tweeted in response to Bertinelli. Twitter user @WhyEthelMertz assumed Bertinelli's pronouns and thanked "Miss Bertinelli" for their support. @WhyEthelMertz added, "I guess his 'look at how persecuted I am as a straight white man' post didn't go how he expected." Ouch ... and yes, it does seem safe to assume Mr. Saad's pronouns.