Sabazius

Well, he was a billionaire because he sold his successful business to Hewlett-Packard, who then wrecked it and strong-armed a case through the DoJ to claim he’d somehow misconstrued the value of his company, and then he spent 13 months in prison awaiting trial and was acquitted because the judge said HP just fucked it, so if we’re making up theories about who’s the villain in this story about an unexplained sinking… Maybe it’s more complex than a cursory reading of a single news article?

Not only is the word fag used by a lot of people, because there are a lot of hateful bigots out there, but even when you don’t mean the nasty implications, it still reminds gay people around you how much the world hates them and leads hateful bigots who overhear you to believe that their views are more widely held and acceptable to share in public. Shocking though it may seem, South Park is not a moral authority on these matters.

Aside from that, if you know a word is commonly used a slur against a disprivileged group, someone advises you to stop using it, and your response is that you’d rather say it, hurt someone and apologise if they complain about it than just stop using that word, what does that say about your priorities?

Right, but that’s a completely different thing than you were arguing. The likelihood of a character being queer is a Watsonian question about demographics of a space station, whereas whether it’s plot relevant is a Doylist question about themes and conservation of narrative. And given that Garrick was originally conceived as a queer character and the actor has explicitly stated that he wanted the character to be queer, but Rick Berman insisted that this not be done and instead wrote in a weird love story between him and young girl, I actually think it’s pretty f****** relevant to discussions around the culture of the show.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Bisexuals exist and aren’t always obvious, so “absent evidence to the contrary, that person might be bisexual” is not an extraordinary claim — hell, assuming similar prevalence of bisexuality then as we see now, which is arguably the lower bound given the cultural changes depicted, it’s statistically improbable that there wouldn’t be at least one non-straight person in the main cast.