I do not wish to downplay the offense of distributing salacious pictures without the subject's consent, but Del. John Cardin's remark that "revenge porn is a harmful form of bigotry and sexual harassment" heads a long list of wrongheaded uses of the word bigotry ("Cardin proposes criminalizing 'revenge porn,' Oct. 28).
What Mr. Cardin was referring to is certainly harmful and it is certainly sexual harassment and it is certainly hateful. But it is not "bigotry."
Bigotry is a blanket offense against a broad class of people for no rational reason; it cannot describe any part of an attack on an individual for individual, personal reasons. To throw it around as a blanket indictment of every hateful or disrespectful or even every prejudicial act or thought that one may have or commit is lazy at best.
Joseph Fisher
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