When should a person be angry about some anti-gay slight or slur in the media — and when should we let it slide?

Let’s face it: there are too many of these offenses to get worked up over everything. We’d be livid 24/7. And let’s also face it: a lot of “offenses” just don’t rise to a level warranting anything resembling “outrage.” They’re mildly annoying at best — and sometimes they might not be offensive at all, but have just been misconstrued by knee-jerk PC-types, at least according to some in the GLBT community.

But what makes some anti-gay slights “outrageous” and others just tempests in teapots — and how do we decide? And what happens when GLBT people themselves disagree?

Consider the gay media brouhahas from just the last few weeks:

• When the FX reality show 30 Days featured an episode on same-sex adoption, they included factually incorrect comments from a spokesperson from the Family Research Council claiming that gay people have higher rates of “mental illness…domestic abuse, child sexual abuse” — statements that went uncorrected on the program.

• After some British viewers as well as American conservatives including Bill O’Reilly complained, Heinz pulled a humorous European television commercial for Heinz Deli Mayo that showed two fathers kissing, with the company citing “consumer feedback.”

• During the network premiere of Brokeback Mountain, Bravo edited out not just the movie’s profanity and more explicit sex scenes, but also a tender kiss between Jack and Ennis.

• In the new movie Hancock, Will Smith plays a superhero in need of an image make-over, who when presented with various images of comic book superheroes, responds, “Homo. Homo in red. Norwegian homo.”

Not all of these actions are equally slanderous (assuming they’re slanderous at all) — and, in fact, the reaction from the gay community has varied for each of them.

For the 30 Days episode, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, issued a very public “action alert,” asking people to contact the network to complain.

When the news broke that Heinz had pulled their gay-themed ad, the British gay rights group Stonewall called for a boycott of their products and an online petition was started to pressure the company to return the ad to the airwaves.

Many gay blogs and discussion boards were abuzz over Bravo’s unceremonious editing of Brokeback Mountain, but no official action was taken by GLAAD.

And GLAAD didn’t issue an “action alert” regarding Hancock, but they did highlight it on their website, saying they understand “that sometimes anti-gay language shows up in dramatic narrative to reveal a character’s true colors, or to convey a message,” but that the Hancock dialogue was just “a cheap, unfunny shot at gay people.”

But there wasn’t unanimity in the GLBT community on any of these issues. Dennis Patrick, one of the two gay fathers featured in the 30 Days episode, issued a statement saying he thought it was “balanced and fair.”

And regarding the Hancock “slight,” one AfterElton.com reader noted that the Hancock character is a “sleazebag” at the beginning of the movie, loud-mouthed and irresponsible. “If taken as presented, it shows how wrong it is to be homophobic,” Dennis commented on the site. “We can certainly discuss whether it's a bad idea to use ‘homo’ in that context with a certain number of idiots guaranteed to be in the audience who won't understand the context. But to extend that to the idea that the film-makers themselves are expressing homophobia is indeed a silly overreaction.”

Next page! Don't get mad — get GLAAD (to get mad for you)!