Imagine for a minute the reaction around New York if Joe Torre, during a pre-game sit-down with 20 reporters, used that famous deragatory term for a homosexual to describe Mike Lupica. Do you think there would be a bit of controversy around town?

In yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times, columnist Greg Couch quoted White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen as having done pretty much exactly that before Tuesday’s game while talking about Jay Mariotti, the obnoxious Sun-Times columnist you might have seen blowing hard on ESPN’s “Pardon the Interruption.”

Guillen later explained to Couch that he hadn’t meant any harm by the comment and that he not only has gay friends but goes to WNBA games and Madonna concerts (which presumably makes everything alright). Scott Reifert, a spokesman for the White Sox, apologized yesterday, saying, “that’s not something that we stand for as an organization.”

On its own, this is one thing, but you may recall that last year in Yankee Stadium, Guillen announced the arrival of a friend to reporters by shouting, “Hey, everybody, this guy’s a homosexual! He’s a child molester,” thus seeming to equate the two. Gay rights groups were already plenty mad at Guillen, and now they’re a lot more so.

The ongoing story – in which Guillen is criticized, Guillen apologizes, and so on – is all a pretty standard bit of identity politics kabuki. Major league managers shouldn’t be using that sort of language, and there’s nothing wrong with calling him out for it. But the irony is that it seems Guillen’s problem isn’t that he’s a bigot, but that he uses salty language at inappropriate times.There are, after all, plenty of people in baseball who use the same word he did to mean the same thing he meant by it – that someone is weak, not a real man. Just about none of them have ever said anything like, “To me, everybody’s the same. We’re human beings created by God.” By the standards of today’s game, that’s not all that far off from coming out of the closet as a gay man.

For baseball as a game, the real issue is its culture of homophobia. Prominent players like John Smoltz, who once compared gay marriage to man marrying an animal, and Todd Jones have said shockingly bigoted things over the years with little or no consequences. One could take this as tacit approval of their views, given that John Rocker’s notorious rant earned him a 14-game suspension without pay, thus setting a precedent for punishing players who offend people.

To be fair, the Cubs made pitcher Julian Tavarez go to “sensitivity training” classes after he called Giants fans “fa–ots,” so it’s not as if all of baseball is utterly hypocritical.

That sort of punishment is deeply silly. The point of it isn’t to actually change anyone’s views, but to teach them that saying certain things in mixed company is impolite. That may be a good thing, but it also may just lead to people holding the same views and keeping quiet about them, thus stifling debate.

If John Smoltz thinks gay people getting married is the same as me marry ing a dog, he ought to say it so people who think differently can explain why he’s wrong and hold him up to ridicule, and so others who agree with him can explain their views. That’s healthy; everyone pretending that big league baseball players hold roughly the same social views as those to be found among New York Times readers on W. 79th Street is not.

All of which still leaves us with the issue of how baseball ought to respond to Guillen. It’s not an easy question. Baseball as a whole gets pretty queasy about the notion of homosexuality, and the associated subjects of culture and religion. How would the self-professedly evangelical Colorado Rockies deal with one of their players proudly proclaiming himself a gay man? How would Bud Selig look if he suspended and fined Guillen, only to have Guillen protest that he was being discriminated against on the basis of cultural misunderstanding, because homophobic slurs are treated differently in Caracas than they are in Chicago? Who thinks that any baseball executive in his right mind even wants to think about this?

I understand why others might feel differently, but I happen to think the best policy here would be for central baseball to simply issue a statement pointing out that Guillen is a boor whose views aren’t those of Major League Baseball and leave it at that. The problem isn’t that ballplayers and managers talk like 12-year-old boys, or even that a few of them are naive enough to do so where reporters can hear them. If there’s a problem, it’s that many of them are homophobes simply because they’re athletes in a culture where homophobia is often part and parcel of being an athlete at any level.

That’s not a problem baseball can fix or even really begin to address; it’s something for churches and school boards, not Bud Selig, to deal with. Baseball gives us cause enough for outrage from time to time; this is cause for eye-rolling, mockery, and some serious thought about what real 12-year-old boys are being brought up to think.

tmarchman@nysun.com