This week on Glee, Glee Club leader Finn (Cory Monteith) outed lesbian cheerleader Santana (Naya Rivera) in the middle of McKinley High School's famously homophobic hallways during a heated argument. Since the episode aired, fans of Finn have claimed that Santana has famously been a bully and that she deserved to be outed. Santana fans fired back, calling Finn's actions unforgivable.

Bullying has been a constant theme on Glee since the show began airing. However, bullying has been dealt with in very different, and often problematic, ways, depending on the target. In its weekly episode recap, pop culture blog Project RunGay wrote, "Glee has a problem with bullying in that they want to appear as the stalwarts in the fight against teen bullying, except that they've used bullying as a source of comedy since the show began. Put more bluntly, … Glee thinks bullying is hilarious until someone bullies a gay character."

Santana has played the "hot bully" role since the show's inception, picking on other characters for everything from their weight to their intelligence. However, writers and fans alike have interpreted her behavior as simply part of her "sassy Latina personality" (actual quote from a Glee forum). Last season on Glee, another closeted student, Dave Karofsky (Max Adler), also played the role of the self-hating gay bully, but as soon as viewers found out he was gay, they were expected to view him as an understandable, if not sympathetic, character. However, RunGay writes: "It's a poor way to discuss bullying to have your victim be a bully herself and expect the audience to feel for her when a tiny little bit of what she's been dishing out to everyone around her finally lands back on her."

Few people are denying that Santana needed to be pulled down a few notches, but there seems to be a wide agreement that outing went too far—especially considering the experience of already-out gay students at McKinley. Further, one commenter on E! News' episode recap wrote, "It is not the place of a Caucasian, cis-gendered [not transgendered], heterosexual, able-bodied male to take away the agency of a minority in disclosing her sexuality."

That might be a little too much sociology jargon, but the point remains. It was not Finn's place, nor his perogative, to take away Santana's right to coming out on her own terms.

What do you think? Do bullies deserve to be bullied right back?