As in any sophist’s war, definitions are important. Political correctness, the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Politics informs us, was “an influential movement on U.S. campuses beginning in the late 1980s [that] sought changes in undergraduate curricula to emphasize the roles of women, non-white people and homosexuals in history and culture, and attacked the domination of ‘Western’ culture by dead white European males.” The Oxford people go on to note that political correctness was in full retreat by the early 1990s.

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>>PC Primer

http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~nhughes/htmldocs/pc.html

Q: WHAT IS P.C.?

PC stands for Politically Correct. We of the Politically Correct philosophy believe in increasing a tolerance for a DIVERSITY of cultures, race, gender, ideology and alternate lifestyles. Political Correctness is the only social and morally acceptable outlook. Anyone who disagrees with this philosophy is bigoted, biased, sexist, and/or closed-minded.

Q: WHY SHOULD I BE PC?

Being PC is fun. PCism is not just an attitude, it is a way of life! PC offers the satisfaction of knowing that you are undoing the social evils of centuries of oppression.

Q: I AM A WHITE MALE. CAN I STILL BE PC?

Sure. You just have to feel very guilty.

Q: WHY?

If you are a white male, your ancestors were responsible for practically every injustice in the world- slavery, war, genocide and plaid sportscoats. That means that YOU are partially responsible for these atrocities. Now it is time to balance the scales of justice for the descendants of those individuals whose ancestors your ancestors pushed down.

Q: HOW?

It’s simple. You’ve got to be careful what you say, what you think, and what you do. You just don’t want to offend anyone.

Q: YOU MEAN I SHOULD GUARD AGAINST OFFENDING ANYONE?

That’s right. Being offensive is destructive, and will not make the world a harmonious utopia, like in John Lennon’s IMAGINE.

Q: HOW ELSE CAN I BE PC?

Oh, there are lots of ways. For example, why buy regular ice cream when you can buy “Rain Forest Crunch?” Segrega..whoops..separate all of your garbage into different containers: glass, metal, white paper, blue paper, plastic, etc. Make sure that all your make-up has not been tested on animals. Try to find at least sixty ways to use your water; when you take a shower, brush your teeth at the same time. Then don’t let the water go down the drain, use it to irrigate your lawn. Or better yet, replace your lawn with a vegetable garden. Don’t use aerosol. And by all means, don’t burn or deface our flag. Remember, as a citizen of Canada, your living in God’s country.

If you are fortunate enough to know your ethnic heritage, dress the part! Don’t do drugs. You should listen to at least one of the following PC musicians: U2, REM, Sinead O’Connor, Sting, or KD Lang.

Harrass people who wear fur coats. Remind them that an innocent baby seal was mercilessly clubbed. Or just yell, “FUR.” They hate that. And don’t EVER eat meat.

Q: DON’T EAT MEAT? WHY NOT?!

Cows are animals, just like humans are animals. That means that they have rights. When you eat meat, you’re oppressing animals!

Q: SO ALL KILLING IS BAD?

No, not always. Sometimes killing can be justified, like in the Persian Gulf. You have to be able to tell when an animal has rights, and when it doesn’t.

Q: HOW DO I KNOW WHEN AN ANIMAL HAS RIGHTS?

The general rule is as follows:

IF AN ANIMAL IS RARE, PRETTY, BIG, CUTE, FURRY, HUGGABLE, OR LOVABLE, THEN IT HAS RIGHTS.

Examine the following chart:

RIGHTS	NO RIGHTS
cows	cockroaches
cute bunnies	flies
dolphins in tuna nets	tuna in tuna nets
whales	sharks
red squirrels	gray squirrels
owls	loggers
harbor seals	barnacles

Q: WOW. WHAT ELSE CAN I DO TO BE PC?

Hug a tree. Rejoice each day in our cultural differences, for they are what gives flavour to our great country. Get in touch with your sexual identity. Check your refrigerator for freon leaks. Subscribe to National Geographic. Search it for neat non-Western cultural traditions and costumes. After you read it, use the paper as an alternate fuel source.

Q: I’M NOT SURE ABOUT ALL OF THIS.

If you are feeling unsure about your motivation, just remember. YOU ARE RIGHT. It’s that simple. You are right.

Q: HOW DO I KNOW IF AN ACTION IS UN-PC?

Good question. It’s important to know when someone is saying something insensitive so that you can have that person removed from society. The guideline is as follows:

Is the confrontation between two white people? Yes -> The liberal is right. No -> The white person is oppressing the ethnic person.

Remember, many seemingly obvious issues, such as the railroading of Mayor Marion Barry, the Clarence Thomas issue, and the Saint Mary’s University Carribean Society shut-down are really race issues.

Here’s a fun practice drill for you: See how many newspaper articles you can make into race bias stories. It’s fun! Some PCers are so good they can make the weather report look like a KKK pamphlet!

Q: WHAT SHOULD I DO IF I SEE SOMEONE DO SOMETHING NON-PC?

It all depends on the situation. If you are not in a position of authority, by all means report this activity immediately to whomever is in charge. If your school leader, employer, or superior is hip to the trend of the 90s, she or he will take the necessary steps to have the insensitive offender disciplined.

Q: BUT ISN’T THAT CENSORSHIP?

The Constitution never meant for racism, sexism and insensitivity to be espoused by anyone. That’s not what free speech is about. Some call it censorship. PCers call it “selective” speech. Saying something negative about a particular race or gender is just as damaging as, say, punching them in the face. We just can’t allow that kind of verbal assault.

Q: I’VE HEARD A LOT ABOUT PC WORDS TO REPLACE “BLACK,” “INDIAN.” ETC.

Yes. That’s part of the PC movement. You see, part of the way we think about people comes directly from the words we use to describe them. Take “black” for instance. Why should a person be judged by the color of their skin?

Q: YOU MEAN THEY SHOULD RATHER BE JUDGED BY THE CONTENT OF THEIR CHARACTER?

No, I mean they should be judged by where their ancestors are from. If your great grandparents are from Africa, or Asia, or wherever, then you should be identified by that fact. You can even apply for special scholarships!

Q: I’M A MIXTURE OF FRENCH, GERMAN, ENGLISH, AND RUSSIAN. CAN I GET ONE? No, there are none offered to white males however, if you are a women ...oops... womyn, there should be plenty.

Q HEY, WOULDN’T A WHITE PERSON FROM LIBYA OR EGYPT TECHNICALLY BE AN AFRICAN-CANADIAN?

Technically, yes. But that’s not the kind of African-Canadian we mean. That is, we’re REALLY talking about skin color, but we’re pretending that we aren’t. Another example: A white South-African immigrant is not an African-Canadian or either.

Q: HOW CAN I LEARN TO MAKE MY LANGUAGE MORE POLITICALLY CORRECT?

For more help, see the PC LEXICON at the end of the handbook.

Q: I’D LIKE MY CHILD TO BE PC. WHAT CAN I DO?

Well, for one thing, we should forcibly encourage students to volunteer their time with philanthropies. Also, we should re-emphasize non-Western perspectives on history. Finally, we should re-structure tests and quizzes to reflect cultural biases.

Q: I DON’T GET IT.

Well, the way the system works now, “select” under-represented minorities who tend to do worse on entrance tests have lower standards of admissions at school and work and receive preferential treatment. This is unfair and wrong.

Q: IT IS?

Yes. The truly PC way to do it is to have a different grading scale for different groups which gives or subtracts points from the final score, depending on who is taking the test. If you are white, then you have been benefited by society during your life. That means that you lose ten to fifteen points to make the test fair to everyone else.

Q: I GUESS THAT SOUNDS RIGHT.

It IS right. That’s the beauty of PC.

Q: WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO BE CAREFUL OF?

Humor. PC people take every comment VERY seriously. We will not accept any comment, joke, remark, or anything that sounds like it could be a racial slur.

Q: GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE.

“What’s black and white and red all over?” has been staple humor for decades. Not PC---it can be taken the wrong way.

In every day speech, try to use phrases like, “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle African-Canadian.” Any racial jokes or jokes even mentioning culture or gender should be omitted. True, this mostly limits comedy to the level of sitcoms, but that’s the price you pay for social equality.

Q: IS THAT ALL THERE IS TO IT?

Yes. The Politically Correct belief is essentially a recognition that people are diversely equal. We rejoice in this equality by treating people differently based on their equal individuality. Hop aboard the bandwagon... Be PC. Or you’re an intolerant, racist, sexist insensitive pig.

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>>PC Lexicon

“Insensitive Term”	“Preferred Term”
-> ETHNICITY <-
(PC people do not recognize the term, “race,” as valid)
Black	African-Canadian	(note: does not include Libyans, Egyptions, white S-Africans. Does include people with dark skin regardless of where they are from or where they live.)
Oriental	Asian-Canadian	(note: not considered “real” minorities since they tend to do well)
Indian	Native-Canadian	(note: the following teams are not PC: Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Indians, Kansas City Chiefs, Washington Redskins, AVOID THESE CITIES!!!)
Chicano	Hispanic	(note: the following are not PC: Cheech and Chong, Chico and the Man episodes, Cisco Kid, Rosarita Salsa, Speedy Gonzales, AVOID! AVOID!)
White Trash	PC Unaware, Rustically Inclined
WASP (white male)	Insensitive Cultural Oppressor (ICO)
-> GENDER <-
(PC people don’t like the word “sex” as it has confusing connotations)
Woman	Womyn, Vaginal-Canadian
Girl	Pre-Womyn
Housewife	Domestic Engineer
Fireman	Firefighter
Stewardess	Flight Attendant
Meter Maid	Parking Enforcement Aduciator
Post Man	Post Person
Mail Man	Person Person
Policeman	Law Enforcement Officer, Baton Boy, Cal. Clubber
Prostitute	Sex Surrogate	(Teen Victim. See: Broken Home)
Mankind, Human	Earth Children
-> PEOPLE : SUB-GROUPS <-
Handicapped	Physically Challenged, Differently Abled, Handi-Capable
Blind	Optically Darker, Photonically Non-receptive
Deaf	Visually Oriented
Poor	Economically Unprepared
Bum	Homeless Person, Displaced Homeowner, Philosophy Major
Hunter	Animal Assassin, Meat Mercenary, Bambi Butcher
Whaler	Blubber Lovers
Old Person / Elderly	4th-Dimentionally Extended, Gerontologically Advanced
Conservative	Right Wing Extremist Fascist Pig
Drug Addict	Chemically Challenged
Bald	Comb-Free
Bisexual	Sexually Non-preferential
Midget, Dwarf	Little People, Vertically Challenged
Convict	Socially Separated
Insane People	Selectively Perceptive, Mental Explorers
(person with) (person with) Learning Disability	Self-Paced Cognitive Ability
Tree-Hugger	Environmental Activist
Logger	Wood Weasel, Paper Pirate, Treeslayer
Dead People	Dysfunctional Earth Children, Biologically Challenged, Metaphysically Challenged
-> MISCELLANEOUS <-
Broken Home	Dysfunctional Family
HouseBroken	Family Disfunction
Cattle Ranch	Cattle Concentration Camp (CCC), “Moo-shwitz”
Senile Bag o’ Bones	Alzheimer’s Victim
Ghetto/Barrio	(EHA) Ethnically Homogenous Area, Pre-Integrated Pre-Nirvana
Hamburger	Seared Mutilated Animal Flesh (SMAF)
Cheeseburger	Adding Insult to Injury
Cheating (in School)	Academic Dishonesty
Used Books	Recycled Books
Trees	Oxygen Exchange Units
Gang	Youth Group
Pimp-mobile, Low-rider	Culturally Responsive Transportation Option
Drunk/Trashed	Spatially Perplexed
Slum	(EOZ) Economic Oppression Zone
Delicatessen	Corpse Farm, Charnel House
Obese	People of Mass, Gravitationally Challenged

==============================

Political Correctness: Origin and Nature

http://www.users.bigpond.com/smartboard/pc.htm

What Is Political Correctness?

Political Correctness (PC) is the communal tyranny that erupted in the 1980s. It was a spontaneous declaration that particular ideas, expressions and behaviour, which were then legal, should be forbidden by law, and people who transgressed should be punished. It started with a few voices but grew in popularity until it became unwritten and written law within the community. With those who were publicly declared as being not politically correct becoming the object of persecution by the mob, if not prosecution by the state.

The Odious Nature Of Political Correctness

To attempt to point out the odious nature of Political Correctness is to restate the crucial importance of plain speaking, freedom of choice and freedom of speech; these are the communities safe-guards against the imposition of tyranny, indeed their absence is tyranny ( see “On Liberty”, Chapter II, by J.S. Mill). Which is why any such restrictions on expression such as those invoked by the laws of libel, slander and public decency, are grave matters to be decided by common law methodology; not by the dictates of the mob.

Clear Inspiration For Political Correctness

The declared rational of this tyranny is to prevent people being offended; to compel everyone to avoid using words or behaviour that may upset homosexuals, women, none-whites, the crippled, the mentally impaired, the fat or the ugly. This reveals not only its absurdity but its inspiration. The set of values that are detested are those held by the previous generation (those who fought the Second World War ), which is why the terms niggers, coons, dagos, wogs, poofs, spastics and sheilas, have become heresy, for, in an act of infantile rebellion, their subject have become revered by the new generation. Political Correctness is merely the resentment of spoilt children directed against their parent’s values.

The Origins Of Political Correctness

A community declines when the majority of its citizens become selfish, and under this influence it slowly dismantles all the restraints upon self-indulgence established by manners, customs, tradition and law (See the law of reverse civilisation). As each subsequent generation of selfish citizens inherits control of the community, it takes its opportunity to abandon more of the irksome restraints which genius and wisdom had installed. The proponents of this social demolition achieve their irrational purpose by publicly embracing absurdity through slogans while vilifying any who do not support their stance. The purpose of the slogan is to enshrine irrational fears, or fancies, as truth through the use of presumptuous words, so public pronouncement:

* Dissembles the real nature of the claim

* Identifies any dissenters as enemies of the truth

* Acts as an excuse for any crimes committed in its name

For example the slogan Australia is Multicultural is a claim that:

* Different cultures are compatible.

* People who contradict this claim are blinded by prejudice against other cultures.

* People who contradict this claim are trouble-making bigots, which makes them enemies of the community, if not humanity, and deserving persecution.

Which is an attack upon truth, clear thinking and plain speaking .

From Bourgeois To Racist

Naturally as the restraints shrink the rebellion grows ever more extreme in nature. When the author of Animal Farm wrote an article in 1946 about the pleasures of a rose garden, he was criticised for being bourgois. George Orwell mentions this in his essay A Good Word For The Vicar Of Bray, published in the Tribune, 1946. Now, in the late 1990s, the results of being bourgeois ( but labelled racist, sexist etc ) are losing your job, your reputation, being jostled in the street , risking judicial penalty and perhaps receiving death threats. And it is this very extremity of reaction that has won media attention and the name Political Correctness, though the reaction will become even more unpleasant with the next generation.

Parental Values Always Attacked

The inevitable scapegoat for people impatient of restraint must always be parents, because these are society’s agents for teaching private restraint. So the cherished notions of the parents are always subject to attack by their maturing off-spring. This resentment of tradition was observed in his own civilisation by Polybius (c. 200-118 BC), the Greek historian, who said:

“For every democracy which has enjoyed property for a considerable period first develops through its nature an attitude of discontent towards the existing order,..”

Tyranny Grows

Once a community embraces tyranny the penalties can only grow in severity. This gradual increase is easily seen by the example of Toastmasters. As the members of the club became more concerned about the delights of socialising and less concerned about the disciplines of public speaking, they became more intolerant of citizens who were earnest about learning the art of rhetoric. Once those members who did their duty by truthfully pointing out the shortcomings in another members performance were just labelled as negative or discouraging; later this became a risk of being socially ostracised. Now (since 1998) unpopularity can result in being permanently ejected from the club by a majority vote.

Australian Experience Of PC Tyranny

In my country the tyranny erupted with the persecution of public figures such as Arthur Tunstall for uttering truths that had become unpopular, either directly in a speech, or indirectly by telling jokes. The maiden speech of the federal member of parliament for Ipswich contained so many disliked truths that the rabble escalated the ferocity of their attack and extended them to her supporters, introducing terror into Australian politics. Anyone who watched the TV coverage (1997/8) of Pauline Hanson’s political campaign will have seen the nature of her opponents; a throng who looked and behaved more like barbarians than citizens of a civilised community. And any mob who chants “Burn the witch” (when she spoke outside an Ipswich hall after she had been refused entry ) leaves no doubt as to their intent or character.

Widespread Throughout The Community

Revealing the extent of the mob’s support, their sentiments ( suitably refined ) were enthusiastically echoed by the media and the administration. And in an unprecedented act of cooperation, all the political parties conspired to eject Ms Hanson from the federal parliament in the election of October 3rd 1998. This was revealed by the how-to-vote cards of the parties contesting the seat of Blaire, which all placed Ms Hanson last. This was a public admission by both the major parties that they would rather risk losing the election than allow this forthright woman to keep her seat in parliament.

International Experience Of PC Tyranny

And it is not just in Australia but in every western democratic country popular demands have been made for restrictions on expression. Bowing to the clamour of the electorate, politicians in these countries have enacted absurd laws. The Australian community wide declaration of irrational hatred displayed by the persecution of Pauline Hanson, paralleled the Canadian experience of Paul Fromm, director of the Canadian Association for Free Expression Inc., and the examples of the national soccer coach of England and a prominent public servant in Washington, USA confirm the hysteria is everywhere.

Inevitable Impact

Recognising the pathetic nature of the hysteria that is taking over the community will not halt its impact. Once expression gets placed in a strait-jacket of official truth, then the madness that occurs in all totalitarian states is obtained. Life, in private and public, becomes a meaningless charade, where reality shrinks, delusion thrives and terror rules.

Examples Of Denying Freedom Of Speech

Evidence of this effect is amply demonstrated by the Soviets, who embraced Political Correctness with the Communist Revolution. The lumbering, pompous, impoverished, humourless monster this Nation became is now History. And it should be remembered that in 1914 Tsarist Russia was considered, at least by Edmund Cars, a French economist who then published a book about the subject, to be an economic giant set to overshadow Europe. The SBS television program “What Ever Happened To Russia” which was broadcast at 8.30 pm on 25th August 1994, detailed the terrible effect the Bolshevik’s oppression had on their empire. And SBS further detailed the terrible crimes inflicted upon the Russians by their leader Stalin, in the series “Blood On The Snow” broadcast in March 1999.

An Old Witness

Helen, a member of Parramatta writers club in 1992, was a citizen of Kiev during the Red Terror, and described living with official truth and the constant threat of arrest. Knowing the content of the latest party newspaper was critical to avoiding internment, as public contradiction, either directly or indirectly, meant denouncement to the KGB. If you complained about being hungry when food shortages were not officially recognised, then you became an enemy of the state. If you failed to praise a Soviet hero, or praised an ex-hero, then again your fate was sealed. The need to be politically correct dominated all conversation and behaviour, as failure meant drastic penalty. Uncertainty and fear pervaded everything, nobody could be sure that an official request to visit Party headquarters meant imprisonment, torture, death, public reward or nothing important.

Living with such a terrible handicap naturally destroyed all spontaneity of thought or action, rendering the whole community mad. The awful effect this had upon Helen’s sanity was made clear when she escaped to Australia. Here she encountered the free press, which had an unpleasant impact upon her. One day she read The Australian newspaper which happened to carry two separate articles about Patrick White, one praising, the other denigrating, this well known writer. Poor Helen found herself turning from one to the other, which was she to repeat as correct? She nearly had a nervous breakdown.

Political Correctness Is Social Dementia

Unless plain speaking is allowed, clear thinking is denied. There can be no good reason for denying freedom of expression, there is no case to rebut, only the empty slogans of people inspired by selfishness and unrestrained by morality. The proponents of this nonsense neither understand the implications of what they say, or why they are saying it.

Social Decline Grows Worse With Each Generation

Political Correctness is part of the social decline that generation by generation makes public behaviour less restrained and less rational.

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America’s Re-Education Camps (Foxnews, 010509)

Wendy McElroy

This fall, tens of thousands of bright-eyed and probably earnest young men and women will descend on American campuses to begin their academic careers in earnest. Most of them will face what we used to call freshman orientation. More than anything, though, it’s looking more and more like indoctrination.

One of the main components of many of these orientations is diversity, or sensitivity training. Attendance is usually mandatory and often tax-funded. Students will watch films and participate in exercises designed to shake the values they acquired from their culture and families. Two of the most popular diversity-training films are Blue Eyed and Skin Deep.

The 90-minute Blue Eyed documents an experiment conducted by Jane Elliott, a $6,000-a-day sensitivity trainer. In it, a group of 40 people are divided into blue-eyed and brown-eyed people. The former are psychologically brutalized; the latter are psychologically empowered as a lesson in white racism.

Hugh Vasquez’s Skin Deep documents a workshop on race. One section of the accompanying study guide — entitled White Privilege — declares that white privilege controls all power in society and that whites must assume their guilt.

Requiring attendance to sensitivity training has caused some critics to make comparisons to Soviet psychiatry and the re-education camps of some Communist countries, such as Maoist China. There, re-education attempted to replace “bad” personal attitudes with ones that served the purpose of the state.

In an article entitled “Thought Reform 101” (Reason, March 2000) Alan Charles Kors, co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, explicitly compares this diversity training to Communist re-education camps. It is a comparison worth pursuing. The following are merely a few of the parallels.

Alternate Ideologies Must Be Suppressed

Re-education camps often target religious groups because religion represents a strong alternate value system. In similar fashion, diversity training involves systematic denigration of alternate value systems such as conservatism.

In Blue Eyed, Elliott tells a “white male” whom she has humiliated into submission that “what I just did ... today Newt Gingrich is doing to you every day ... and you are submitting to that, submitting to oppression.”

Elliot explains her goal: “A new reality is going to be created for these people.”

Truth Requires Thought Control

In his book Enfer Rouge, Mon Amour, Lucien Trong wrote of the thought control in the re-education camp where he was confined. Prisoners were not permitted to read the words published in magazines and books from the former regime, to sing the words of old songs or to have ‘unauthorized’ political discussions. Pol Pot understood the power of words.

In the study guide to Skin Deep, Vasquez writes: “Language is one of the institutions that serve to perpetuate racism ... Thus, language is a critical element in eliminating the mistreatment of any group ... Should we be ‘politically correct?’ Of course we should if what we mean by this is eliminating language that is part of how mistreatment is perpetuated.”

Family Ties Must Be Weakened

Re-education camps break the loyalty that prisoners feel toward their families who often offer an alternate system of values. A Vietnamese prisoner wrote, “When making declarations about relatives, we had to make mention of their guilt as well.”

In Skin Deep, a student named Dane admits his family’s racist guilt: “No way I can step back and change that (his great grandparents fighting for the Confederacy in the Civil War).” He comments, “It’s tough choosing what’s right and choosing your family.”

The Propagandists Have Noble Intentions

In the Los Angeles Times (January 9, 1998), journalist David Lamb reported on a “re-education camp for women with ‘social disorders’” — that is, for prostitutes. The camp director was quoted as saying, “We think of this as a humanitarian program.”

The noble motive of Elliott and Vasquez is to end racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, and heterosexism ... just about every type of non-PC ‘ism’ in existence. The study guide describes the $6,000-a-day Elliot as a courageous pioneer who has endured great personal pain for her stand.

The Effect Is to Heighten Anger and Division Among People

A re-education prisoner reported on the effect camp policy had upon the cohesiveness and goodwill of inmates. “[To] turn prisoners against each other by reading them [confessions] aloud to the group and asking anyone who had knowledge of anything left out or of lies in the statement to step forward.” The prisoners came to suspect, resent and hate each other, looking at those sitting to each side as “the enemy.”

The guide to Blue Eyed describes Elliott as “unrelenting in her ridicule and humiliation of the blue-eyed people [whites]” while “the participants of color watch as white people” feel their guilt for racism. Whites are admonished to “hear people of color, no matter what tone or phrasing they use.” At the same time, they are warned, “don’t expect people of color to bleed on the floor for white people.”

The goal of such vented hatred is also said to be noble. In order to evolve into a society in which people love each other without ‘isms,’ it is necessary to brutalize different classes into appropriate awareness.

All this can, understandably, be a bit much for your average 18-year-old away from home for the first time. Helping kids to adjust to campus life is one thing. Political and cultural re-education, which the champions of the “diversity industry” are peddling at $3,000 an hour, is another.

Taxpayers need to stop footing the bill for these exercises. Parents who wish to nurture the values of their children must oppose the coercive indoctrination of political correctness into their offspring. They must exercise the most important aspect of freedom of speech: The right to say “no.”

==============================

Stanford: Christians Need Not Apply (Free Congress Foundation, 020423)

By Paul M. Weyrich

The University of Nebraska made it to the Rose Bowl this year. Although they were crushed by Miami, Nebraska for decades has been one of the premier teams in college football. So it is little wonder that its coaches are always in demand at some of the more prestigious universities in the nation.

Nebraska Assistant Coach Ron Brown was recruited by Stanford University in California to be interviewed for the head coaching position. But Brown didn’t get very far. Surely he was not discriminated against because he is black. Not at liberal Stanford. No, his race was not a deal breaker. Indeed, it was likely an asset. Ron Brown’s problem at Stanford is that he is a Christian.

Alan Glenn, Assistant Athletic Director at Stanford told the Daily Nebraskan that Brown’s religion “was definitely something that had to be considered. We’re a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at....”

Courtney Wooten, the Director of the Queer Straight Social and Political Alliance, told the University of Nebraska student newspaper: “He would be poorly received by the student body in general.”

Brown, himself, said he didn’t know how he would fit in at Stanford. “The truth is the truth,” Brown said, “I don’t believe you compromise any truth for whatever job.” Ironically, Brown’s wife earned a degree from Stanford and his niece has just been admitted there. “If I’d been discriminated against for being Black, they never would have told me that. They had no problem telling me it was because of my Christian beliefs.”

Brown, who holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University in Providence, R.I., and a Master’s degree from Columbia University in New York City, says “the source of truth is the Bible.” Specifically, Brown has said that homosexuality is not Biblically correct.

That led Courtney Wooten to advise that there would be a “huge number” of football players who would be uncomfortable with Brown’s views on homosexuality. According to sophomore Julie Fitzgerald, Stanford is a “queer friendly campus.” She added that Brown would not fit in very well at Stanford. “If someone with those views came onto campus, there would be a lot of activism about those views.”

The Brown episode illustrates once again that the only discrimination that can be tolerated these days is discrimination against Christians. Stanford prides itself in being in the vanguard of institutions which value “inclusion” and “diversity.” Their faculty has been out front fighting Ward Connerly in his attempt to bring colorblind admission policies to California public education. But when it comes to an outspoken Christian, there is no room at the inn.

Fortunately Brown, even after 15 years, is still welcome at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, which is easily the most liberal city in Nebraska. Even when Brown revealed some of his more controversial religious views on a Christian radio talk show in l999, his job was not in jeopardy.

Does this mean, however, that people with Biblically based religious views need to be confined to a certain part of the country?

The voices on the Stanford campus that can whip up a demonstration against alleged racial or ethnic (even anti-Muslim) discrimination in a matter of minutes have been silent regarding Brown. It is perfectly acceptable to discriminate against people whose views are not politically correct.

Brown said it is ironic that a prestigious school founded on religious principles is no longer welcoming to born again Christians. “They seemed to have no notion of squelching or eliminating one because of his representation of Jesus Christ.” Brown remarked.

Ryan Wilkins, the President of the Association of Students at the University of Nebraska, told the Daily Nebraskan, “The Stanford decision sends a dangerous message.” Wilkins added: “He’s a football coach. Judge him on whether his players play well on the field, whether his players respect him or whether his players graduate. Don’t hire or disrespect a man because he carries a Bible in his suitcase.”

Well said, but not acceptable at Stanford, where politically correct views are more important than Brown’s ability to coach.

==============================

Through the FIRE: Fighting for freedom of thought (NRO, 020919)

School is in. Time to steel yourself for ten more months of horror stories about campus political correctness. But before the madness begins, let me give you some good news — even great news. When it comes to America’s politically correct campuses, all is not lost. In fact, in some important respects we are actually beginning to win the battle for freedom of thought at America’s colleges and universities. That is largely because of a feisty little three-year-old named FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Everyone who cares about intellectual freedom in the American academy needs to know that there is real reason for hope. Or perhaps we should say that the enemies of freedom in today’s academy have finally learned that they are playing with FIRE.

Three years ago this October, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education was founded by right civil libertarian Alan Charles Kors and left civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate, best friends since college. That tells you something important. FIRE is about the respect for freedom of speech and conscience that used to unite all Americans, whatever their political persuasion. And truth to tell, despite the takeover of our college campuses by radicals who claim that classic liberalism is simply a cover for the power of oppressive elites, the great majority of the American people still believe in our traditional liberties.

That is the secret of FIRE’s success. If FIRE had a motto, it would be Supreme Court Louis Brandeis’s famous phrase: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Simply by publicizing (or by threatening to publicize) the worst campus abuses of individual freedom, FIRE has repeatedly succeeded in forcing radical professors and benighted college administrators to back down. In effect, FIRE works by deploying the good sense of the American people against the tyrannical machinations of our campus radicals.

As someone who follows these issues with care, I can tell you that I have rarely seen anything as exciting as an article about FIRE in a publication entitled, Dean & Provost. Dean & Provost is a specialized newsletter directed to high-level college administrators. The article in question featured an interview with FIRE founder, Alan Charles Kors, and told administrators in no uncertain terms that, while they might find Kors’s views shocking or offensive, they had best be forewarned. In any controversy over speech codes, political indoctrination at freshman orientation, or the fairness of disciplinary proceedings against the politically incorrect, administrators would likely be facing either Kors himself, or one of his colleagues from FIRE. And in case after case, where they have indeed been confronted by Kors and his compatriots, college administrators have been forced to surrender.

So what did Alan Charles Kors say to Dean & Provost that was so shocking and offensive? You really have to read the whole interview, but here are some choice excerpts:

Q: Aren’t chief academic officers damned if they do and damned if they don’t as far as political correctness? How can they in all good conscience not protect minorities, women and gays and lesbians on campus?

Kors: What an absurd question. Chief academic officers should work to protect everyone on campus from crime, violence, and violations of their rights. What you term “minorities” (we are each a minority of one), and women, and gays and lesbians should have equal protection from crime, violence and violation of their rights. Rights belong to individuals; rights are not a zero sum game.

Q: How do minority professors and students feel about FIRE protesting against political correctness? Don’t they expect to have a safe campus environment?

Kors: I don’t distinguish students and professors by blood as you have just done, and I don’t assume that there is a “minority” perspective that follows from blood. No one who tells people that they are too weak to live with freedom, legal equality, the Bill of Rights or academic freedom is their friend. Everyone expects a safe environment on campus. Anyone who initiates violence should be punished.

Anyone who has the presence of mind, the depth of understanding — and the sheer guts — to turn back such p.c. questions so brilliantly has my deepest regard. It saddens me (though it hardly surprises me) that we’ve reached a state where a publication like Dean and Provosts can find Kors’s apt and admirable remarks offensive. But it delights me to imagine Kors and his friends sitting across the table from actual deans and provosts throughout the land — reading them the riot act in exactly this way.

That, in fact, is precisely what happens when FIRE goes to work. Seventy-five percent of FIRE’s cases are successfully resolved without any publicity, chiefly because Kors and company privately let the administrators in question know what true liberty means — and promise that the world will hear about it if classic liberal principle is trampled. Again and again, politically correct administrators cave.

In its first big case, FIRE went to the defense of a Christian student group at Tufts University which had refused to promote a member with an unorthodox view of scripture and sexuality. That member was a lesbian. When the Christian group was put on probation by Tufts, FIRE intervened, pointing out that a gay student group would not be put on probation for refusing to promote an Evangelical Christian with a traditional view of sexuality. Once a hair’s-breadth from the grave, Tufts’s Christian student group is now thriving.

FIRE has also made tremendous headway in its battle against the kangaroo-court disciplinary hearings commonly deployed against students and professors brought up on charges of sexual harassment or offensive speech. Largely because of public opposition orchestrated by FIRE’s canny and articulate executive director, Thor Halvorssen, Columbia University’s draconian “sexual misconduct policy” (i.e. sexual-harassment code) is on its last legs, while Harvard’s code has already been reformed. Columbia’s code denied all procedural rights to the accused, such as the right to an attorney, the right to cross-examine witnesses and the accuser, the right to an appeal, the right to an impartial jury, etc. With changes at universities like Harvard and Columbia, Halvorssen and FIRE may yet succeed in provoking a nation-wide reform of campus sexual harassment codes and rules for disciplinary hearings.

Another FIRE case shows why reform of these kangaroo-court college disciplinary proceedings is so desperately needed. In the wake of 9/11, FIRE went to the aid of Ken Hearlson, a tenured political-science instructor who was suspended and barred from the campus where he had taught for 18 years — without a proper hearing — after being accused by Muslim students of insulting them in class. After interviewing 25 witnesses and listening to audio tapes of the class, the accusations were found to be without merit. Yet even then — with taped proof of his innocence — it took publicity from FIRE to get justice for Hearlson. How many others are subject to punishment in kangaroo proceedings based on false accusations? What about those who are not fortunate enough to have audio tapes and an organization like FIRE on their side?

It isn’t only conservatives who are defended by FIRE. Halvorssen makes it clear that FIRE would quickly come to the aid of a homosexual student group or a group of students who lionized Malcolm X, if they were denied money because of their views. You might say that finding a case like that is about as likely as finding the Easter Bunny. But last year, Linda McCarriston, a Marxist-Feminist professor at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, did indeed come under assault by radical students and craven administrators, for daring to criticize multiculturalism in her class, and for writing a poem about sexual abuse in native Alaskan culture. I wrote about this case in “P.C. Hits Anchorage,” noting at the time the critical role played by FIRE in turning the tide in favor of McCarriston’s academic freedom.

With these and many other victories under its belt, FIRE is on a roll, and well placed to make national reform of campus speech codes, college-sponsored political indoctrination, and kangaroo disciplinary proceedings a reality. Naturally, given the near-total domination of America’s campuses by radicals with no love of liberty, too much optimism on this count would be foolish. But it is not at all unrealistic to say that, on many fronts, FIRE has given the opponents of campus p.c. a fighting chance — and more. This is a new and tremendously important development, and it deserves recognition.

Last academic year, with an enormous number of well-publicized and successful cases, FIRE truly came into it’s own. But the battle has only begun. There are two things that readers can do — they can let FIRE help them, and they can help FIRE. As we head into the new school year, students and professors need to know that if their rights are violated, they can turn to FIRE. In fact, FIRE will soon make available a series of pamphlets that detail the rights to speech, freedom of conscience, and fair procedure to which all of America’s students and professors are entitled. Armed with knowledge of their rights — and with the knowledge that they can call on the aid of FIRE should those rights be trampled — it will become increasingly difficult for politically correct professors and administrators to tyrannize their campuses.

For those with the inclination and the means to be of help in this battle, contributions to FIRE can make all the difference in the world. FIRE is not a wealthy organization, far from it. For three years, FIRE has worked miracles on a shoestring budget (both Kors and Silverglate serve without pay). But FIRE’s success means that more and more students and professors who run afoul of political correctness are calling on FIRE’s services. Without increased funding, FIRE will lose a rare opportunity to generate truly national victories against campus political correctness on several critical fronts.

— Stanley Kurtz is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

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The Marriage Premium: A book — and an institution — gets exonerated (NRO, 011115)

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute

A year ago, I wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal exposing a case of egregious political bias at Harvard University Press. In an unusual move, the board of Harvard Press declined to publish The Case For Marriage — a lively, rigorous, and path-breaking study of the advantages of marriage coauthored by respected University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite and syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher. Although The Case for Marriage had garnered two positive reviews from Harvard’s own scholarly referees, the Press’s Board of Syndics rejected the book at the last minute on the grounds that Waite and Gallagher had failed to prove a causal relationship between marriage and the many benefits that they claimed for the institution.

Harvard’s stated reasons for rejecting The Case for Marriage were utterly unconvincing. For one thing, Harvard had already published feminist tracts with scandalously thin empirical grounding by Catherine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan. (The shaky empirical foundations of Gilligan’s In A Different Voice were exposed, to considerable public attention, by Christina Hoff Sommers’s book The War Against Boys.) So why not publish Waite and Gallagher’s extraordinarily well-researched study? Was this a case of bias against a book that challenged feminist orthodoxy by showing the unique advantages of marriage? You bet it was. (For more on bias at Harvard Press, see “Harvard’s Book Problem.”) But now, a spectacular new piece of research has provided stunning vindication for the Waite-Gallagher thesis on the benefits of marriage.

What the Harvard Press board was asking Waite and Gallagher to do was next to impossible. The only sure way to make causal judgments about the effects of marriage would be to run a controlled experiment, randomly assigning young people to marriage and singlehood and then following their progress throughout life. But human beings are not guinea pigs. That is why even the very best sociological research generally fails to provide concrete causal proof. Since we cannot easily run controlled experiments on real human beings, we generally have to make causal judgments through inference. Harvard was obviously holding The Case for Marriage to an impossible standard — and a double standard — in order to suppress the book.

Yet, lo and behold, as reported in the Washington Post, a year later, two creative researchers, Donna Ginther and Madeline Zavodny of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, have actually found a way to do the seemingly impossible. For the first time in the history of research on marriage, Ginther and Zovodny appear to have successfully shown that the “marriage premium” — the tendency of married individuals to make more money than single people — is an actual effect of marriage, and not just a function of a preference shown by both employers and potential spouses for people with qualities likely to bring about success.

Ginther and Zavodny pulled of this neat little trick by studying “shotgun weddings” — marriages that took place after the woman was already pregnant. Ginther and Zovodny reasoned that couples marrying under such pressured circumstances were likely to include many individuals who might not otherwise marry. If the men in these “shotgun” marriages ended up with greater income than single men with the same sort of background, then the “marriage premium” would be real, and not simply the result of a “selection effect.” (The marriage premium applies to working wives as well, but Ginther and Zavodny only studied men.)

It turns out that even men stampeded into marriage by a pregnancy earn about 16 percent more than single guys. Almost 90 percent of the marriage premium remains, even for a group in which selectivity has been substantially short-circuited by the advent of a pregnancy. Of course, even here, a degree of selection bias is bound to exist. Not every couple marries when there is a pregnancy, and it’s reasonable to suppose that those who are already most suited to each other, and to marriage itself, are more likely to marry on the discovery of a pregnancy. But the white men in the “shotgun” group earned less, were younger, and had less education than other white men getting married. Clearly, these men were less desirable as husbands, and the marriages were substantially precipitated by the pregnancies. Yet the marriage premium remained. So Ginther and Zavodny appear to have found the “holy grail” of sociological research on the effects of marriage — a way to eliminate selection bias and provide causal proof of marriage’s beneficial effects.

When I called Linda Waite for comment on the Ginther and Zavodny study, she was obviously excited. Waite called the study, “pretty amazing,” and characterized the results “powerful evidence for a causal effect over selectivity.” According to Waite, it was “almost shocking” that a full 90 percent of the marriage premium remained in effect for the “shotgun” couples.

Why the marriage premium? The mutual advice, emotional support, and concrete help that married partners provide to one another seems to free up and strengthen both husbands and wives to succeed at what they do. When married women work, they make more money than single women. When married women mother, on the other hand, their personal financial premium disappears. Yet mothers benefit from something far more valuable — the support and protection of a husband who himself seems to strive (and succeed) that much more for the sake of — and with the help of — his wife and child.

Now that this important causal evidence in support of Waite and Gallagher’s The Case for Marriage has emerged, their erstwhile feminist critics will no doubt fall over themselves in the rush to retract their skeptical attacks. And with causal proof at last secure, surely Harvard University Press will offer to publish the sequel to the rejected book, just as Harvard Press has continued to publish book after book by Catherine MacKinnon and Carol Gilligan. At least, that’s what would happen if Harvard Press is motivated — as they say they are — not by ideology, but simply by the highest standards of scholarship.

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Harvard’s Book Problem, and Ours Harvard says it publishes conservative authors. Yeah, right (NRO, 010228)

By Stanley Kurtz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute

Ever since tales of campus political correctness started cropping up in the popular press, the academic Left has dismissed stories of bias as mere anecdotes — odd exceptions to the tolerance and even-handedness supposedly typical of today’s colleges and universities. Nothing could be further from the truth. For every case of political correctness that makes it to the papers, a thousand others are hidden from view. It takes a singular convergence of chance, credentials, and courage for a story to see the light of day.

In exceptional cases, we find that a lone tale of egregious political correctness opens a window onto the pervasive, often carefully hidden, bias festering in today’s academy. Last October, in an Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal, I exposed what seemed but a single case of political correctness at Harvard University — the rejection by Harvard University Press of Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher’s superb new book, The Case for Marriage. Four months later, it now looks like dislodging one great obscuring rock at Harvard Press allowed the sun to shine in on all manner of squirming, scampering mischief-makers.

When Harvard University Press, under highly unusual circumstances, rejected The Case for Marriage, it claimed that the book wasn’t up to scholarly snuff. But the real sin of Waite and Gallagher was to debunk feminist orthodoxy by showing that marriage is not just another lifestyle choice, but the best available family arrangement.

Last fall I discovered that The Case For Marriage had received two positive reviews by scholars commissioned to vet the book for Harvard Press. One of those reviewers called the manuscript, “the most important book in the family field that has been published in many years.” Ordinarily, two positive internal reviews are enough to ensure publication. But in a rare step, The Case for Marriage was torpedoed by the Harvard Press Board of Syndics at the eleventh hour. In private documents, the board claimed that the book was too harsh in tone and its evidence too meager.

That was a sham. The Case for Marriage is written in a calm, laconic style that let’s its carefully amassed scholarly evidence speak for itself. And Harvard Press publishes books by the notorious feminist Catherine MacKinnon that are shrill beyond precedent for scholarly works. When MacKinnon isn’t condemning all men as incipient rapists, she’s spinning out undocumented assertions about the link between pornography and rape. Then there’s literary critic Leo Bersani’s Harvard Press Book, Homos, which examines homosexual sadomasochism and pederasty. Bersani’s claim is that homosexuality is inherently disruptive of society — and that this is a good thing. How comes it then that The Case for Marriage, a model of calm and cogent argumentation, backed up by carefully sifted facts, should be rejected by the board of Harvard Press — after receiving high praise from its own reviewers on grounds of harsh tone and meager evidence? Tone and evidence had nothing to do with the case. Waite and Gallagher successfully exposed the fallacy of the Press’s anti-family orthodoxy, so their book had to go.

That was the story last fall. But we’re now beginning to learn more about bias at Harvard Press. After my Op-Ed appeared, the Boston Globe ran a story on the controversy. Harvard Press refused to explain its decision to ax The Case for Marriage, but Press spokesman Mary Kate Maco rejected my claim that the book was nixed for political reasons. After all, she said, Harvard Press publishes many conservative authors, like Richard Posner, Cass Sunstein, and Abigail Thernstrom. One problem. Cass Sunstein isn’t conservative. Sunstein is a prominent liberal, lately famous as a signatory, along with Rosie O’Donnell, of a much-criticized full-page ad, during the Florida election battle, backing Gore’s position on the recount. Richard Posner is certainly a brilliant and a worthy conservative, but of the libertarian variety. His support of gay rights and his sharp criticism of traditionalists like Gertrude Himmelfarb hardly prove that Harvard Press is willing to publish social conservatives. So, out of a booklist of thousands, Harvard Press comes up with a total of one-and-a-half conservative books one of its examples being patently bogus. Could anything be more revealing of Harvard Press’s overwhelming political bias?

It gets worse. Only last week Harvard’s student newspaper, the Crimson, ran a story on the controversy over The Case for Marriage. This time Harvard University Press trotted out fresh proof of its supposed openness to conservatism. The Press proudly proclaimed that it had once published a book by Harvard professor, Harvey Mansfield. Yes, Harvey “C minus” Mansfield, that famous battler against affirmative action and grade inflation. So there! How dare anyone claim that a broad-minded institution like Harvard University Press is biased against conservatives.

Ah, but the Crimson hadn’t noticed an extraordinary story on this controversy by Village Voice columnist Norah Vincent. Actually, very few people noticed that story, because it was released on election day. In the article, Vincent, who once worked for Harvard University Press, made a devastating case against Harvard’s claims of fairness. For one thing, Vincent turned up two new examples of alleged political bias against conservative authors by the Press. And one of them was…you guessed it, Harvey “C minus” Mansfield.

Twenty three years ago, Harvard Press published a short book on political theory by Mansfield. But just a couple years ago, Harvard Press rejected Mansfield’s proposal to complete a book on manliness. And Mansfield learned from someone at the Press, whom he refused to name, that his book proposal had been rejected “because it was thought or found to be anti-feminist.” So now Harvard Press’s fourth specimen of its willingness to publish conservatives turns out not just to be bogus, but to be a parade example of the very bias the Press is being accused of.

It gets worse still. Vincent also revealed that Harvard Press, despite glowing internal reviews, had rejected a manuscript critical of both feminism and postmodernism by a young untenured professor named Peter Berkowitz. Vincent noted that Berkowitz’ first book for Harvard Press had won an award, and that his rejected second manuscript was later published by prestigious Princeton Press. This story is particularly interesting because Berkowitz has been involved for some time in a high-stakes lawsuit against Harvard for rejecting his tenure application. Many argue that Harvard’s rejection was caused by bias against Berkowitz’s moderately conservative views.

Even a far from conservative, but fair-minded writer like Norah Vincent, who herself once worked for Harvard Press, argues that the Press list is “heavily weighted toward radicals.” And Vincent wisely points to the case of Carol Gilligan, the renowned feminist author published by Harvard Press. Whatever you think of them, Gilligan’s arguments are important and deserve publication. But the poor quality of Gilligan’s empirical research was brilliantly exposed by Christina Hoff Sommers in her recent book, The War Against Boys. In fact, Gilligan’s quantitative work has long been known among empirical researchers for its thinness and unreliability. How then, can Harvard Press repeatedly publish Gilligan’s poorly documented feminist polemics while castigating a thoroughly documented work like The Case for Marriage as shrill and unsupported?

No one at Harvard Press, other than its media-relations officer, would talk either to me, the Boston Globe, or The Village Voice. But the Crimson’s gutsy student reporter, Frances Tilney, managed to reach William P. Sisler, the head of Harvard Press, at his home. Trapped by an actual Harvard student, Sisler had to say something, so he simply repeated the claim that The Case for Marriage was second rate and not worth publishing. How does that square with an enthusiastic review by James Q. Wilson (in National Review), perhaps the most esteemed political scientist of his generation and a long-time professor at Harvard University?

Last week’s Crimson story makes it clear that Harvard is still stonewalling — and still making bogus claims of broad-mindedness. It turns out that The Case for Marriage was only the tip of the iceberg. And remember, Vincent’s newly identified cases only represent those with the guts and credentials to go public. What about the young conservative scholars who never get to have academic careers in the first place? What about those who are rejected before attaining the stature needed to prove that they’ve been wronged? Thousands of books, and Harvard Press can find only one-and-a-half that are credibly conservative.

My claim still stands. Like so much of today’s elite academy, Harvard University Press, having abandoned classic liberal traditions of fairness, has been corrupted by a profound bias against anyone who dares challenge the cultural radicalism it habitually favors.

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‘Winning the Cultural War’: Charlton Heston’s Speech to the Harvard Law School Forum February 16, 1999

http://mizai.tripod.com/

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. “My Daddy,” he said, “pretends to be people.”

There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo.

If you want the ceiling re-painted I’ll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I’m never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I’m the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty of your own freedom of thought ... your own compass for what is right.

Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America,”We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that’s about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you ... the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve ... I serve as a moving target for the media who’ve called me everything from “ridiculous” and “duped” to a “brain-injured, senile, crazy old man.” I know ... I’m pretty old... but I sure as Lord ain’t senile.

As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I’ve realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it’s much, much bigger than that. I’ve come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr.King in 1963 - long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else’s pride, they called me a racist. I’ve worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh.

From time to time ,friends and colleagues, they’re essentially friends from Time Magazine, say how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!” But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we’d still be King George’s boys - subjects bound to the British crown.

In his book, “The End of Sanity,” Martin Gross writes that “blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction.Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don’t like it.”

Let me read a few examples. At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation ... all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive.

In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs --- the state commissioned announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not..... need not..... tell their patients that they are infected.

At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team “The Tribe” because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name.

In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery.

In New York City, kids who don’t speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R’s in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic.

At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students. Yeah, I know ... that’s out of bounds now. Dr. King said “Negroes.” Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said “black.” But it’s a no-no now.

For me, hyphenated identities are awkward ... particularly “Native-American.” I’m a Native American, for God’s sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife’s side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American... with a capital letter on “American.”

Finally, just last month ... David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word “niggardly” while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, “niggardly” means stingy or scanty. But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: “David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who (a) didn’t know the meaning of niggardly, (b) didn’t know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance.”

What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can’t be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America’s campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who’re supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let’s be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the rightist. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that and abide it ... you are - by your grandfathers’ standards - cowards.

Here’s another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they’ll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor’s pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers. I don’t care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you?

Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead, “Don’t shoot me.” If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion.

If you accept but don’t celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don’t let America’s universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism.

But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer’s been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people. You simply ... disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King ...who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might.

Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Vietnam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom.

But be careful ... it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated ... to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I’m not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me.

Let me tell you a story. A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called “Cop Killer” celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so--at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of “Cop Killer”- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

“I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF

I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF

I’M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF

I’M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF...”

It got worse, a lot worse. I won’t read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore.

“SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ....”

Well, I won’t do to you here what I did to them. Let’s just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said “We can’t print that.”

“I know,” I replied, “but Time/Warner’s selling it.”

Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T’s contract. I’ll never be offered another film by Warner’s, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk. When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself ... jam the switchboard of the district attorney’s office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors... choke the halls of the board of regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl’s cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment ... march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you...petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine’s cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ...boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobedience’s of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God’s grace, built this country. If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree.

==============================

Political correctness (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

The neutrality of this article is disputed.

Political correctness is a term which originally referred to efforts to redress, primarily in the use of language, real or perceived discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other criteria. An example would be substituting the word disabled for cripple for a person with a permanent injury.

Use

In recent years, political correctness has come to be used seriously by some and jokingly by others, in protest against policies seeking conformance with a set of beliefs, primarily of leftists (in the United States, traditionally identified as political liberals, but also known as progressives), which encourage cultural change. The term is also frequently used by conservatives in a broader sense to characterize any of a numerous set of beliefs they disagree with, including in such areas as environmentalism or foreign policy. Liberals counter that though conservatives claim that liberals use political correctness to suppress speech, conservatives use the label “political correctness” to suppress speech.

Right wing activists when they try to control the content of material, particularly school textbooks, focus on the handling of material such as evolution and abortion. Considerations from both left and right wing activists as well as sexist and ethnic groups concerns are included in bias and sensitivity guidelines which are used particularly in the school textbook area but also in the construction of testing.

With respect to the narrower sense in which this term is frequently used (which concerns minority groups), adherents of this viewpoint may feel that one should use the so-called “politically correct” (often abbreviated “PC”) term “African-American” rather than “negro” or “black”, to avoid offending people in that group. It can also include support for such political policies as affirmative action and multi-lingual education; some degree of support of environmentalism and opposition to capitalism are often regarded as politically correct as well. Other targets of the supposed movement include the gender-specific pronouns of English and other languages that are perceived to perpetuate aspects of male-centered culture. Some have suggested that the adherents of these linguistic changes are concerned with, in many cases, their acceptance of some form of linguistic relativism (e.g., the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), the idea that language influences thought and culture, or even--in some sense--that it constitutes reality itself. However that is, advocates of these language changes are agreed that the proposed changes are designed mainly to treat others with respect by not using terminology that offends them.

The term “political correctness” is itself fraught with controversy. Self-described political progressives now generally reject the use of the term, primarily because it is now usually used pejoratively, particularly by opponents who consider many advocates to be overzealous. Progressives also argue that the term is essentially meaningless, on the theory that any ideological belief, not just those on the left, are “correct” to the extent that they follow from their underlying values. They would also argue that defending the victims of repression or discrimination does not itself constitute intolerance. Critics (often, but not exclusively, political conservatives) argue that advocacy of “PC” views can amount to thought control or censorship, or that it at least makes open discussion of important social issues more difficult. However, the critics of PC have themselves been accused of using the word as a kind of smear term which itself acts as a form of thought control, much in the way that red-baiting was used in the 1950s. Proponents have also been accused of hypocrisy for denouncing mainstream religions as judgmental while themslves engaging in perceived “bashing” of groups such as whites, males, corporations, and others.

One central issue in the culture wars surrounding political correctness concerns what has come to be called affirmative action. Many of those critical of so-called political correctness argue that perceived persecution of minority groups and women is enough for proponents to demand redress, regardless of whether actual discrimination or persecution has been proven to take place. The defenders of affirmative action argue that discrimination in individual cases is often subtle and hard to prove, and that affirmative action is thus necessary in order to redress this problem at a broader level. Others suggest that affirmative action for one group (such as women) can in the same ‘subtle’ way be detrimental to less popular groups (such as black men), and that the strength of politically correct ideology tends to stifle an open and rational analysis of such situations in the popular media.

The history of the phrase

The alleged existence of political correctness, both the movement and the term describing it, rose to broad usage in the early 1980s. In the view of one conservative commentator, Bill Lind, however, the intellectual roots and attitudes associated with PC are many decades old [1] and rooted in radical leftist movements. Also, in a linguistics mailing list [2], there was discussion of the term used--sometimes quite straight-facedly--in the early and middle 1970s. Use of the terms “PC” and “politically correct” declined in the late 1990s, and the allegedly repressive political attitudes associated with these beliefs have started to fall out of favor somewhat, but it is asserted that the above-described attitudes associated with political correctness are still very strong in many universities and other institutions.

Satirizing PC

A well-known satirical take on this alleged movement can be found in the book Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, in which traditional fairy tales are rewritten from a so-called politically correct viewpoint and often reverse the roles of good and evil from those of the original version. For example, Hansel, Gretel and their father are evil and the witch is good in the politically correct version of Hansel and Gretel.

The practice of satirizing so-called PC speech indeed took on a life of its own in the 1990s, though it is no longer so popular. Part of what it is to understand the meaning of “PC” is to be familiar with satirical portrayals of political correctness, and to understand them as such. Such portrayals are often exaggerations of what actual politically correct speech looks like. For example, in a satirical example of so-called PC speech, the sentence “The fireman put a ladder up against the tree, climbed it, and rescued the cat” might look like this:

The firefighter (who happened to be male, but could just as easily have been female) abridged the rights of the cat to determine for itself where it wanted to walk, climb, or rest, and inflicted his own value judgments in determining that it needed to be “rescued” from its chosen perch. In callous disregard for the well-being of the environment, and this one tree in particular, he thrust the disabled-unfriendly means of ascent known as a “ladder” carelessly up against the tree, marring its bark, and unfeelingly climbed it, unconcerned how his display of physical prowess might injure the self-esteem of those differently abled. He kidnapped and unjustly restrained the innocent animal with the intention of returning it to the person who claimed to “own” the naturally free animal, but it immediately fled his grasp, having withstood more insult and injury than it could bear.

The above text admixes the most radical versions of several movements or theories, including non-sexist language, animal rights, cultural relativism, accessibility, emotional development, and environmentalism.

==============================

America in Crisis: The Triumph of Political Correctness (excerpt)

http://members.aol.com/williefank/pc-essay.htm

by Wm. B. Fankboner

An impalpable censorship is eliminating all intellectual and artistic vitality with a vengeance, while persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution is corrupting and debasing language. The coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding this capricious censorship inhibits the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions, and ultimately of man’s own social and spiritual life. Thoreau warned us to ‘beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ What would he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?

‘Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.’––Doris Lessing

‘Chastity, by nature the gentlest of the affections––give it but its head––’tis like a roaring lion.’ –– Laurence Sterne

History, like life, is chock-full of coincidences. Consider, for example, the re-emergence of political correctness in the wake of the communist collapse in Europe, disparate events without any apparent connection. But coincidence is often only a statistical illusion, a bit of hocus-pocus that can be explained by the laws of cause and effect, and a closer look reveals a linkage: inspired by the defeat of the Soviet Bloc and the dawning of an Age of World Peace, pious utopians of the New Left have begun a crusade to conquer the evils of society itself. Verily, the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Now that the threat of armed conflict has been eliminated from the human landscape, we may begin the noble work of creating an organic social order, a dream that has eluded mankind from time immemorial. – Doris Lessing

There is only one problem: man himself. Deluded by the idols of the cave, man is an irrational and impulsive creature driven by unspeakable urges and unseemly appetites, ruled by habit and superstition. To the childlike mind of the social revolutionary, the solution is simple: remake human nature! Man is obviously not completely evolved and the universe is not in finished condition. There is still work to be done. Let us begin this noble task by eliminating incorrect thoughts from the minds of men with a program of linguistic hygiene; let us purge speech of all the verbal correlates that reference undesirable behavior. Do not incorrect thoughts invariably lead to incorrect actions?

If this has a ominous ring, it should: merely substitute ‘subversive’ for ‘incorrect,’ and you have the old party line for thought control and the suspension of free speech for the greater good of the state. How ironic it would be if the conquest of world communism only resulted in its revival in cultural form, as a kind of mental paralysis and spiritual lobotomy. What a triumph for the forces of totalitarianism if they could, by this simple mental transposition, retire the familiar apparatus of social repression––midnight arrests, torture, murder, blackmail, deceit and all the other instruments of subversion and terror––and rely on an impalpable censorship to achieve their ends. The police state would no longer need a vast army of agents and informants, and a network of forced labor camps, to enforce its will; it need only condition and indoctrinate man to police his own thoughts.

Ideology does not like a vacuum. Is Doris Lessing’s intuition that political correctness is ‘the heritage of communism’ correct? Have the dispossessed ghosts of the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary Club found a new home in the victims’ revolution? Can group-think become an end in itself, rather than a mere catalyst to social amelioration? While this tranformation in tactics probably isn’t what Marx had in mind when he called for the ‘forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions,’ it’ll do in a pinch; and it comes not a moment too soon for the moribund Communist movement. As any good Marxist will tell you, the Communist revolution was supposed to take place in a decadent capitalist society, not in a Slav agrarian economy like Czarist Russia’s, leaving many to wonder whether Russian Communism was nothing more than Russian nationalism masquerading as ideology. But if, as die-hards of the Marxist rearguard maintain, Communism has never failed because it has never been truly implemented in any society, what is this but to say that Marxist doctrine in its ‘pure’ form is so perversely utopian and politically regressive it has never captured the imaginations of able men?

That militaristic regimes and police states contain the seeds of their own destruction is, of course, a historical truism. After interrogating senior officials of the Nazi party in the aftermath of World War II, intelligence analysts from the U. S. State Department expressed surprise at their mediocrity, observing that, with exception of few men like Albert Speer, they were ‘a bunch of jerks,’ an opinion shared by many Germans at the time. How a gang of inept sociopaths succeeded in taking over the country that produced Kant, Goethe and Beethoven is still something of a mystery. Most Germans you ask about this simply shrug and say they awoke one morning and found the Nazis in control. Though the Nazi Party seized power in stages, over a period of fifteen years, the recollection of many ordinary citizens is of an event that took place overnight.

Something of the same illusion of suddenness attends the arrival of political correctness. It seems only yesterday that cases of PC began appearing in the press and the evening news. There was about these initial incidents a sense of suspended disbelief and complacency, and its early critics were accused of hysteria. Katharine Whitehorn, a British journalist, wrote:

“The thing has been blown up out of all proportion. PC language is not enjoined on one and all—there are a lot more places where you can say “spic” and “bitch” with impunity than places where you can smoke a cigarette.”

Few understood that by the time a cultural phenomenon has come to the attention of the media, it is already deeply entrenched. Typical of reported incidents was U. S. Congresswomen Pat Schroeder’s criticism of the aircraft industry. Her complaint was that current specifications for the cockpits of fighter aircraft conformed to only 85% of the general population. Fighter cockpits should accommodate 95% of the population, insisted the stalwart egalitarian. Aeronautical engineers patiently explained that an ejection seat designed to hurl a 250 pound man clear of a mach 2 fighter, would toss a 110 pound woman into high orbit.

Absurdity is the inevitable result when sensitivity collides with common sense, and incidents like this have provoked hoots of laughter from both the Right and the Left, as well as the growing contempt of the public. But even while their critics are whooping in the aisles, it looks as though PC partisans may have the last laugh. Imperceptibly, the victims’ revolution has acquired the ubiquity of smokers’ cough and the ferocity of Sterne’s roaring lion. A sense of inevitability hangs in the air, and there are ominous signs of a fait accompli. Doubters who thought PC was a camp phenomenon or a passing fad need only read the New Yorker review of the movie What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, in which the mentally retarded brother is described as ‘mentally challenged.’ Evasive, patronizing and inelegant, tortured circumlocutions like this have crept into the writing of discriminating writers who would have considered them ludicrous a few years ago. Thoreau warned us to ‘beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.’ What would he have said about enterprises that require new vocabulary?

Even the august L. A. Times, flagship of the Times-Mirror colossus bestriding downtown Los Angeles, succumbed to the victims’ rights agenda, and its stylebook committee codified a new set of amendments proscribing such phrases as ‘Dutch treat.’ This, of course, is absurd, and quite typical of the comic contradictions that arise when the totalitarian mind attempts to interpret culture. The charm of slang is its inherent bias, and even members of the Times stylebook committee must know that you cannot eliminate evil from the world by expurgating language. Nor is that their purpose. During the debriefing of a KGB agent who had defected to the West during the Stalinist era, a CIA official asked him why the Communist Party line was so patently stupid. Didn’t this actually work against loyalty to the state? The KGB agent laughed and replied that you cannot create an atmosphere of terror by requiring people to believe in reasonable things. In order to instill the maximum fear, guilt and self-loathing necessary to cow people into abject submission to the state, you must demand that they believe, or at least act as though they believe, in something that is manifestly absurd. The list of forbidden words and phrases enforced by the thought police at the L.A. Times certainty satisfies this condition, and is a useful reminder that the armory of social repression is not only rather lethal, it is utterly impersonal. Those who resort to coercive censorship, whether they are egalitarian thistlebottoms at the L.A. Times or doctrinaire thugs of the KGB, wield the same bloody axe. The results are uniformly destructive to the human spirit.

Those least alarmed by inhibitions to thought are those who have none themselves. It is easy to understand the crude appeal of political correctness to liberal yahoos of the New Left (closet fascists posing as 60’s liberals): it provides them with a ready store of social causes that require no thought and confer instant moral authority on any who profess to champion them; less obvious is its attraction to the intelligentsia. The unctuous solicitude for minorities and clammy compassion for the unfortunate professed by PC zealots are an affront to human dignity; their cynical tactics of manipulation and intimidation are a throwback to the police state; and their childish faith in the efficacy of social engineering hopelessly naïve. What self-respecting liberal could be taken in by such fatuous posturing? What is Pat Schroeder doing telling Lockheed how to build jet fighters? Why have hard-nosed veteran journalists developed a sudden Pollyanna fixation? Why are distinguished publications, famed for their aggressive editorial independence, appeasing self-anointed victims’ groups and groveling before sanctimonious minorities?

More to the point, why would any society beset with real social problems (pandemic crime, the worst educational system in the industrialized world, an imploding socioeconomic infrastructure, in a world where terrorist states have access to nuclear weapons, etc.) squander its limited moral resources on the puffed-up moral distinctions posed by PC partisans? The question answers itself. The PC movement is both a potent distraction from more intransigent social problems and an ersatz substitute for the patience, wisdom and expertise needed to solve them; while the emergence of a class of PC carpetbaggers guarantees that, as the lurid melodrama of victims’ revolution unfolds in the full glory of its irrelevance upon the stage of jaded public consciousness, grave issues of national survival will continue to be pushed further into the background.

As an invention of the educated elite, the victims’ revolution is essentially a class phenomenon, i.e. designer morals for yuppies of uneasy conscience. While PC partisans agonize over whether to call persons of African descent ‘blacks’ or ‘negroes,’ tens of thousands of Africans are dying of starvation, AIDS, and in tribal conflicts. Socioeconomic groups informed by the stark exigencies of survival haven’t shown the slightest interest in the hair-splitting subtleties and scholastic quibbling of victim taxonomy. Coincidentally, these are the very social groups PC purports to champion; but this would not be the first time a subversive agenda and questionable motives had been concealed by a smokescreen of concern for the common man.

Moreover elaborate stratagems to compensate penalized minorities and avoid giving pain to others, e.g. quotas, affirmative action, preferential treatment, euphemistic speech, censorship, and other palliates, often achieve the very opposite. By drawing attention to, and stigmatizing the victim’s disability, they serve only to confirm that he hasn’t enough self-esteem, dignity and imagination to deal responsibly with his own problems. As a corollary, such a strategy tends to encourage self-pity and the manufacture of sensitivities without end, promoting an autonomous culture of victims and empowering sanctimonious minorities and PC carpetbaggers with unearned moral authority. We are all minorities of one, and no amount of sympathy or fellow-feeling, however well-intentioned, will ever remove the pain of isolation or the tragic nature of the human condition.

PC zealots hold that if we attend to minutiae, larger issues will take care of themselves, that if (say) you proscribe ethnic humor, genocide will become, literally, unthinkable. This is whistling in the dark. Not only does it lull society into a false sense of security, but the persistent recourse to euphemism and circumlocution corrupts and debases language, and the coercive atmosphere of guilt, fear and intimidation surrounding these paternalistic prohibitions inhibits the easy give-and-take of human discourse, the life-blood of democratic institutions, and ultimately of man’s own social and spiritual life. Reflecting on his early education in the regimented German school system, Albert Einstein observed that his natural curiosity was so thoroughly blunted by his harsh and authoritarian schoolmasters, it was years before he recovered his love of learning and joy of discovery. It is a common mistake for the champions of sensitivity to assume that we are fragile and vulnerable in our affective life, when it is our cognitive life that is at risk. Human feelings and emotions are, by comparison, robust and resilient, whereas human understanding, the capacity to conceive and learn, is a delicate mechanism that requires continuous nurture.

The Persistence of Utopia

The latest cause célèbre of the victims’ revolution is cash reparations for the descendants of American slaves. With an unerring instinct for lurid controversy and eccentricity unmatched by the tabloid press, Harper’s Magazine conducted a forum in its pages called, “The Case for Reparations.” One would have thought that the casualties of the American Civil War had gone a long way toward the cancellation of that debt. Perhaps a visit to America’s Civil War cemeteries would appease some of the twice- and thrice-removed ‘victims’ of 19th Century slavery. But the victims’ movement is about the here and now and historical amnesia; which perhaps explains why PC partisans have never bothered to deal with several inconvenient facts surrounding negro victimology. Consider, for example, the curious preference of African-Americans for Muslim first and last names. Why have no liberal scholars ever mentioned that it was not Christian missionaries, but North African Arabs and Berbers who organized and ran the black slave trade? In a similar vein, there is no linguistic evidence that ‘welshing’ on a debt is a slur on the inhabitants of Wales (the verb being of unknown origin), yet its use is forbidden by the PC handbook. When the coin of the realm is moral indignation, historical truth is a devalued currency.

Political Correctness is the triumph of sensitivity over truth; but it is more and less than that…..

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Political Correctness: The Scourge of Our Times (Newsmax, 020408)

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/4/4/121115.shtml

by Agustin Blazquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton

Does anyone know the origins of Political Correctness? Who originally developed it and what was its purpose?

I looked it up. It was developed at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany, which was founded in 1923 and came to be known as the “Frankfurt School.” It was a group of thinkers who pulled together to find a solution to the biggest problem facing the implementers of communism in Russia.

The problem? Why wasn’t communism spreading?

Their answer? Because Western Civilization was in its way.

What was the problem with Western Civilization? Its belief in the individual, that an individual could develop valid ideas. At the root of communism was the theory that all valid ideas come from the effect of the social group of the masses. The individual is nothing.

And they believed that the only way for communism to advance was to help (or force, if necessary) Western Civilization to destroy itself. How to do that? Undermine its foundations by chipping away at the rights of those annoying individuals.

One way to do that? Change their speech and thought patterns by spreading the idea that vocalizing your beliefs is disrespectful to others and must be avoided to make up for past inequities and injustices.

And call it something that sounds positive: “Political Correctness.”

Inspired by the brand new communist technique, Mao, in the 1930s, wrote an article on the “correct” handling of contradictions among the people. “Sensitive training” – sound familiar? – and speech codes were born.

In 1935, after Hitler came to power, the Frankfurt School moved to New York City, where they continued their work by translating Marxism from economic to cultural terms using Sigmund Freud’s psychological conditioning mechanisms to get Americans to buy into Political Correctness. In 1941, they moved to California to spread their wings.

But Political Correctness remains just what it was intended to be: a sophisticated and dangerous form of censorship and oppression, imposed upon the citizenry with the ultimate goal of manipulating, brainwashing and destroying our society.

PC Cuba

My first conscious exposure to Political Correctness was in 1959 – the first year of Castro’s revolution in Cuba – while attending an indoctrination session at a neighborhood elementary school in Havana. There I learned for the first time of the claimed superiority of life in the Soviet Union vs. the U.S.

There I also learned that the word “compañero” (filtered version of the communist “comrade” – Fidel was denying his communist preferences) was the correct way to refer to the other members of the new Cuban society-in-the-making.

Mr., Mrs. and Miss were no longer acceptable, and their further use could reveal that you were not a Fidelista. Since repression and violations of human rights came roaring in right behind Castro’s sweep down from the mountains in 1959, objection or rejection of Fidel Castro’s revolution would (and still will) land you in a lot of trouble. You could easily lose your life in those summary executions at La Cabaña prison under the direction of Che Guevara.

But don’t worry about Che. Che was later transformed and cleansed by the masters of Political Correctness. His likeness became a revered icon of the far left, with T-shirts and posters still adorning the campuses of America.

The same techniques were used to cleanse one of today’s “heroes,” Mumia Abu-Jamal (even if he was convicted, by overwhelming evidence, of killing a cop).

And under the pervasive guidance of Political Correctness that took hold from elementary school to university, from the media to the arts, from the country fields to factories and offices, Cubans learned to say what it was safe to say. Always in line with the overpowering state. Always following the dictums of the only political party left: the Communist Party.

The self-censorship resulting from Political Correctness easily trampled freedom of speech. Political Correctness has succeeded in Cuba by creating a uniform political discourse that has lasted for 43 years.

Political Correctness has given the state (Castro) complete control of speech. That is the main reason why the U.S. media cannot extract the truth of what Cubans really feel when they interview regular citizens and deceptively present their comments as valid to the American public.

The same was true in the former Soviet Union and the former satellite countries. The same continues in the remaining communist world.

It’s nothing new. The U.S. media must know that, so why don’t they openly report that fact instead of misleading the public? Perhaps that is the reason why the American people are so uneducated about the Cuban tragedy and acted regrettably during the Elian Gonzalez affair.

The PC U.S.

With profound dismay, I have seen how the scourge of Political Correctness has taken hold in the U.S. It is very well entrenched in our educational system, at scientific, religious and community levels, the media, the workplace and even our government.

It is changing the American society from within, and the citizens of this nation are increasingly censoring themselves and losing their freedom of speech out of fear of Political Correctness repression.

It is the nature of Western Civilization to be civilized – respectful of others and concerned with correcting injustices. We don’t need Political Correctness to make us think we are not civilized on our own and must have our thoughts and words restricted.

In December 2001, in Kensington, Md., an annual firefighters Santa Claus festivity to light the Christmas tree was objected to by two families. The city council, in the name of Political Correctness, voted to ban Santa from the parade. Fortunately, due to citizen outcry, the decision was reversed in the end and many people protested by dressing up as Santa.

Logically and respectfully, how can one person’s benign icon be objectionable to the point of banishment? Offer to add other people’s icons. Make it a broader celebration. That’s the Perfectly Correct American way.

The rulers of Political Correctness reach absurd levels when they refer to the betrayal of America by the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – executed in 1953 – as “non-traditional patriotism”!

We see shameful situations created in our schools and universities in America that have fallen prey to Political Correctness. Some professors, students and publications are being attacked for expressing a point of view that differs from that imposed by a fanatical far left, under the guise of Political Correctness.

In schools and workplaces we see that “diversity” has degenerated into reverse discrimination, where often the less qualified are admitted and the incompetent cannot be fired. We have seen characters like Rev. Jesse Jackson shamelessly blackmailing and threatening to boycott entire corporations if they don’t hire those selected by him or simply make “donations” to his organizations.

The Double Standard Emerges

Our Constitution requires the separation of church and state, which has always discouraged our public education system from teaching religion. However, in December 2001, while Christmas cards, symbols and decorations were being objected to for the first time in American public schools in Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon, in an elementary school in Texas, a girl was allowed to give to her classmates an overview and show a video about her Muslim religion.

And in January 2002, a public middle school in San Luis Obispo, Calif., had its students pretend to be warriors fighting for Islam. Another school near Oakland, Calif., also encouraged 125 seventh-grade students to dress up in Muslim robes for a three-week course on Islam.

This arbitrary double standard was applied in the name of Political Correctness following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

According to Ellen Sorokin’s “No Founding Fathers?” published by the Washington Times on its front page on Jan. 28, 2002, even our Founding Fathers have fallen victim to the travesty. The article says of the New Jersey Department of Education’s history standards,

“The latest revisions to the state standards have disappointed educators across the country, who said the board’s exclusion of the Founding Fathers’ names is ‘Political Correctness to the nth degree.’ “

Sorokin points out that “the standards specifically note that students should identify slavery, the Holocaust and modern Iraq as examples in which ‘people have behaved in cruel and inhumane ways.’ “ Conveniently, communism is absent from that short list.

In another article by Sorokin, published by the Washington Times on March 10, “Report Blames Anti-Americanism on College Teachers,” she presents two examples of upcoming courses for next spring and fall. They are “ ‘The Sexuality of Terrorism’ at University of California at Hayward; and ‘Terrorism and the Politics of Knowledge’ at UCLA, a class that, according to its course description, examines ‘America’s record of imperialistic adventurism.’ “

Recently, a historic photograph of the New York firefighters raising the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center was going to be made into a sculpture as a memorial.

But history’s revisionists used Political Correctness to dictate that other minority faces replace some of the faces in the historical photograph! Fortunately, in the end that didn’t fly either, due to the outcry of firefighters and the public.

The Goal of the PC Dictators

For people with the background and firsthand experience of living inside a totalitarian communist society, the tilt and goal of the dictators of Political Correctness in America are obvious.

The beneficiaries in the end will be the fanatic believers in the totalitarian state, who, in spite of the dismal failure of communism and the 100 million people exterminated pursuing that criminal system, have not given up.

Political and religious fanatics, as demonstrated by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the subsequent war in Afghanistan, are extremely dangerous in today’s world.

All citizens who cherish liberty must reject the scourge of Political Correctness. Freedom of speech must be preserved in America if we are to continue to be free.

Let’s say it: Castro is not a ‘president,’ as the U.S. media’s Political Correctness calls him. Castro has not been democratically elected to anything in Cuba. The correct word to define him is ‘tyrant.’ He is not just a ‘leader,’ as the U.S. media also calls him. He is more of a criminal Mafioso-type character.

Why criminal? Because he has caused the deaths of more than 100,000 Cubans. Thousands have died through his support of guerrillas in Central and South America. Thousands of blacks were killed by Castro’s soldiers in Africa. Castro in the 1980s introduced the use of bacteriological weapons to kill blacks in Angola.

How many thousands have died in America as a result of his drug trafficking into the U.S.? How many thousands have died all over the world due to terrorists trained in Castro’s Cuba?

Former Soviet colonel Ken Alibek, who defected to America, was once in charge of the Soviet Union’s production of biological weapons. In Alibek’s 1999 book, “Biohazard,” he revealed that with the help of the Soviet Union, in the 1980s Cuba created laboratories to produce chemical and bacteriological weapons of mass destruction – just 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The information about Castro’s involvement with bacteriological weapons also comes from various independent sources. We must not forget either that Cuba is on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist nations.

Why Mafioso? Well, Castro is like an untouchable godfather, surrounded by bodyguards and thugs and a private army of about 40,000 soldiers for his personal protection (roughly the size of the entire army of Cuba prior to 1959).

He stole foreign and national properties in Cuba. He has become one of the richest men in the world, according to Forbes magazine. He has created a despotic and corrupt elite to exploit the Cuban people and keep himself in power. He has made the Cuban people hostages and slaves of his corrupt regime.

The U.S. media do not call Al Capone “the former leader” of the Italian Mafia. Why the double standard with Fidel and other far-left regimes? The answer can be traced to where the sympathies lie – with the elite dictating Political Correctness in America.

It’s one thing is to be educated, considerate, polite and have good manners, and another to be forced to self-censor and say things that are totally incorrect in order to comply with the arbitrary dictums of a deceiving and fanatical far-left agenda.

Let’s preserve our freedom and say NO to the scourge of Political Correctness.

Agustin Blazquez is producer/director of the documentaries “Covering Cuba,” Covering Cuba 2: The New Generation,” and the upcoming Covering Cuba 3: Elian,” and author with Carlos Wotzkow of the book “Covering and Discovering.”

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Tolerance—The Ultimate Value? (EFC, 030400)

As our society becomes increasingly less Christian, tolerance seems to be the only remaining Canadian value

Christianity is fast becoming Canada’s mystery religion. Ask a jewelry store clerk for a cross and you are likely to be asked, as an acquaintance of mine was: “Do you want the one with or without the little man on it?”

Churches’ ability to influence the national psyche or the national morality is declining, along with attendance and even the most sketchy knowledge of the teachings that shaped our culture.

In the past, most Western nations were bound together by the notion of a moral law handed down by a Supreme Being who forbids adultery, murder and envy, and commands forgiveness, love of neighbour, truth-telling and service to one’s family.

Surveys of the attitudes of Canadian and American teens suggest that the Ten Commandments have become Ten Suggestions. Moral truths are losing out to personal pleasure.

The Barna Research Group in the United States reported that 83 percent of teens between 13 and 18 believe moral truth depends on the circumstances. Reginald Bibby, the University of Lethbridge sociologist who has been chronicling Canadian beliefs and values for 25 years, found that at least half of Canadian teens make decisions based on their personal morality and/or their feelings at the time.

Two of 2002’s Canadian court decisions also raise serious questions about whether we even have any values strong enough to bind us together as a nation.

In December, the Supreme Court of Canada ordered the school board in Surrey, B.C. to reconsider its decision to forbid use in Kindergarten and Grade 1 of readers that portray children living happily with same-sex parents.

Six months earlier, in June, the Ontario Divisional Court overturned a lower court’s decision that Christians may not be allowed to turn away business work that advocates homosexuality. The lower court had ordered Toronto printer and evangelical Christian Scott Brockie to take a sensitivity training course to help him overcome his belief that it would be a sin for him to help promote conduct that he views as immoral. The appeal court agreed that he should be forced to print stationery for the Lesbian and Gay Archives, since this should not offend his beliefs.

Both decisions are partial victories for religious freedom, but they also share the elevation of “tolerance” as the supreme Canadian value.

In the Surrey decision, written for the majority of the court by Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin, we are told that Canada is “a diverse and multicultural society, bound together by the values of accommodation, tolerance and respect for diversity.” Parents’ rights to decide when their children are ready for discussion of same-sex families is apparently less important than tolerance. And the Ontario court’s decision effectively wiped out Brockie’s right to make up his own mind on what jobs he will take on. Once again, tolerance trumped rights.

Tolerance is laudable and important, but it takes more than tolerance of each other’s behaviour and beliefs to bind together a nation, a family, a marriage or even a corporation.

This shift away from a natural moral law towards politically correct tolerance began in the Enlightenment with philosophers such as Germany’s Immanuel Kant. He tried to develop a rational basis for morality, what he called the categorical imperative: that we should act only in ways that would be beneficial if all of us acted the same way. But who is to decide what is beneficial? And what mere philosopher’s suggestion is going to persuade all of us to restrain our impulses?

Moral laws at least give us some clear guidance and some reason to think of others in addition to seeking to satisfy our own desires. Churches, synagogues and mosques also provide the teaching and the peer culture that persuades us to walk the right way day after day.

If we continue to elevate tolerance above such values as truth-telling, the sacredness of life and respect for property, marriage and family, then our common life will ultimately disintegrate. Mere tolerance cannot bind a country together.

Bob Harvey is the religion editor of the Ottawa Citizen.

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Make A Difference With “Merry Christmas” (Free Congress Foundation, 041220)

So let me get this straight. Christians founded this country. There are still more than 80% of Americans who are self-professed Christians. And well over half of these take their religion seriously, attending church at least once a week. The vast majority of our elected and appointed government officials at all levels are Christians. But I am not supposed to wish anyone a Merry Christmas? The campaign to eliminate Christmas from our society is well underway.

Back when I was in grade school, my 6th grade class in 1954 made up hundreds of posters and we walked the streets asking merchants to display them saying “Put Christ back into Christmas.” Even men I now realize were Jewish owners of clothing and department stores willingly co-operated. I recall showing a friend my freshman year in high school that the poster I had made was still in the window of the Jacobson clothing store on 16th Street in Racine, WI.

The principal of Holy Trinity grade school, Rev. Stephen Labaj, inspired us kids to make those posters by telling us that some people in the community were trying to take Christ out of Christmas. It is good that Father Labaj didn’t live to see what is happening today. The momentum to eliminate Christmas altogether is gaining strength at frightening speed. You can feel it. Almost no one, not even some clergymen, wish strangers or even friends “Merry Christmas” anymore. We wouldn’t want to offend anyone, now would we?

Charles Krauthammer, who is of the Jewish faith, in a brilliantly insightful piece in The Washington Post, suggests that some of this effort to take Christmas out of American public life is coming from secular Jews who have not educated their children in their own rich heritage and who want to shield them from feeling badly when they hear carols which relate to events with which they are not familiar. He points out that you almost never hear orthodox Jews making complaints about a crèche at city hall or, for that matter, Christmas carols during a school pageant. That is because they understand their own heritage, feel good about who they are and thus are not threatened by Christians or what they believe.

Being politically incorrect, I have made it a point to tell merchants both in person and on the phone who say “Happy Holidays” that it is okay to wish me a Merry Christmas. The reaction is unbelievable from residents of a nation which was once considered Christian. Mostly they gasp. Some look away. Others nervously say, “Oh, okay. Merry Christmas then.”

Yes, it is true that early Christians didn’t celebrate Christmas. Universal celebration of Christmas did not occur until the 5th Century. It is the only religious feast which began in the West and was imported into the East. But December 25th was not the original date when Christmas was celebrated. The first date of celebration was January 6th, the Epiphany. Many Russian Orthodox churches still celebrate Christmas on January 7th. I’ve never heard Orthodox Russians complain that they are discriminated against because they have to keep their presents under the tree longer.

I mention this bit of history because I now find myself being lectured to by non-believers about the fact that Christians didn’t always celebrate the feast, as if to justify their actions. Many of these militant secularizers are former Christians. Militant secularizers now number around 14% of the population. There are enough of them that Democrats had a special outreach program just to garner those votes, the way that Republicans had a special outreach to Evangelicals and Catholics. They no longer believe in Christmas, if they ever did, and by golly they don’t want others to enjoy it if they can’t. They are angry. The best way they can get back at God and the rest of us is to take away a joyous celebration.

Granted, much which has come to symbolize Christmas has nothing to do with religious celebration. What I remember is the different attitude which came over people at Christmastime. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was based on reality. At Christmas people became kinder. Even old Scrooge softened up and kindness prevailed. My late father, God rest his soul, used to say that you could feel the difference in the whole society at Christmas time. Even non-Christian world leaders used to make some sort of gesture of goodwill at Christmas time. They no longer do so. Could it be that they don’t make such gestures because they know that Christmas has become unimportant?

It was universal. Christmas was the one holiday when people could be sure to be with their family. Of course, firemen, hospital nurses, police officers and other essential people worked. But for the most part things shut down. Not any more. Here in the Washington, D.C. area, Safeway has announced that it will be open on Christmas day. Safeway employees who formerly enjoyed a day off at Christmas won’t get to do so. That will, of course, put pressure on the competition. By next year all major food stores will, no doubt, also be open. Radio stations which used to play genuine Christmas carols at this time of the year (there are two in the Washington, D.C. area which claim they play Christmas music 24 hours a day) no longer play “Silent night” or “Angels we have heard on high.” Rather, it is winter music: Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, The Boston Pops. You get the picture. What little Christmas is left has nothing to do with Christ.

But the real shift has simply been the disappearance of the mention of Christmas. If I hear “Have a nice holiday” one more time I may just scream. If we majority Christians tolerate this, then we get what we deserve. When are we going to stand up and say to this militant minority, “You don’t have the right to take Christmas from us.” What is happening is because we have become tepid. We have been conditioned to think that if we insist on celebrating Christmas, other than perhaps in the inner sanctum of our own homes, we will be offending someone. Utter nonsense. If they are offended, it is their problem, not ours. In the current parlance we should just tell them “We’re here. We are not going away. Neither is Christmas. Deal with it.”

If Christmas disappears it will be because we let it happen. It isn’t too late to reverse things. Start with little things. When merchants wish you a “Happy Holiday,” tell them “I’d prefer if you would wish me a Merry Christmas.”

If the ACLU tries to take Christmas carols out of your public schools, there are at least three public-interest law firms which will take your case at no charge. Likewise, if attempts are made to stop a religious display at City Hall or to prevent a religious float in a so-called Christmas parade, contact Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson (each of whom has a public interest law operation) or the Rutherford Institute, and they will almost certainly help out. Once those who hate God figure out that we are not going to roll over and play dead, they will find something else upon which to spend their time and resources. Don’t you dare blame them for what is happening. Blame us. We have been much too tolerant. It is high time that we put Christ back into Christmas. Fifty years later that plea is far more relevant today than it was back then.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

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SOCIETY: The Culture of Offendedness—A Christian Challenge (Mohler, 060804)

A new and unprecedented right is now the central focus of legal, procedural, and cultural concern in many corridors—a supposed right not to be offended. The cultural momentum behind this purported “right” is growing fast, and the logic of this movement has taken hold in many universities, legal circles, and interest groups.

The larger world received a rude introduction to the logic of offendedness when riots broke out in many European cities, prompted by a Dutch newspaper’s publishing of cartoons that reportedly mocked the Prophet Muhammad. The logic of the riots was that Muslims deserved never to be offended by any insult, real or perceived, directed to their belief system. Unthinking Christians may fall into the same pattern of claiming offendedness whenever we face opposition to our faith or criticism of our beliefs. The risk of being offended is simply part of what it means to live in a diverse culture that honors and celebrates free speech. A right to free speech means a right to offend, otherwise the right would need no protection.

These days, it is the secularists who seem to be most intent on pushing a proposed right never to be offended by confrontation with the Christian Gospel, Christian witness, or Christian speech and symbolism. This motivation lies behind the incessant effort to remove all symbols, representations, references, and images related to Christianity from the public square. The very existence of a large cross, placed on government property as a memorial, outside San Diego, California, has become a major issue in the courts, and now in Congress. Those pressing for the removal of the cross claim that they are offended by the fact that they are forced to see this Christian symbol from time to time.

We should note carefully that this notion of offendedness is highly emotive in character. In other words, those who now claim to be offended are generally speaking of an emotional state that has resulted from some real or perceived insult to their belief system or from contact with someone else’s belief system. In this sense, being offended does not necessarily involve any real harm but points instead to the fact that the mere presence of such an argument, image, or symbol evokes an emotional response of offendedness.

The distinguished Christian philosopher Paul Helm addresses this issue in an article published in the Summer 2006 edition of The Salisbury Review, published in Great Britain. As Professor Helm argues, “Historically, being offended has been a very serious matter. To be offended is to be caused to stumble so as to fall, to fail, to apostasize, to be brought down, to be crushed.” As evidence for this claim, Professor Helm points to the language of the King James Bible in which Jesus says to his disciples: “And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast in to hell” [Matthew 5:29].

Likewise, Jesus also speaks a warning against those who would “offend” the “little ones.” As Professor Helm summarizes, “So to ‘offend’ in this robust sense is to be an agent of destruction. And to be offended is to be placed in desperate straits.”

The desperate straits are no longer required in order for an individual or group to claim the emotional status of offendedness. This shift in the meaning of the word and in its cultural usage is subtle but extremely significant.

Offering a rather robust definition of this new usage, Professor Helm describes this new notion of offendedness as “that one is offended when the words and actions of another produce a feeling of hurt, or shame, or humiliation on account of what is said of oneself about one’s deepest attachments.”

Professor Helm’s definition is rather generous, offering more substantial content to this modern notion than may be present in the claims of many persons. Many persons who claim to be offended are speaking merely of the vaguest notion of emotional distaste at what another has said, done, proposed, or presented. This leads to inevitable conflict.

“People have always been upset by insensitivity and negligence, but the profile of offendedness, understood in this modern sense, is being immeasurably heightened,” suggests Professor Helm. “The right never to be offended, never to suffer feelings of hurt or shame, is being touted and promoted both by the media and by the government and interest in it is being continually excited.” Thus, “Claims to be hurt or shamed are noticed. They are likely to be rewarded.”

The very idea of civil society assumes the very real possibility that individuals may at any time be offended by another member of the community. Civilization thrives when individuals and groups seek to minimize unnecessary offendedness, while recognizing that some degree of real or perceived offendedness is the cost the society must pay for the right to enjoy the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to speak one’s mind.

Professor Helm is surely right when he argues that the “social value” of offendedness is now increasing. All that is necessary for a claim to be taken seriously is for the claim to be offered. After all, if the essence of the offendedness is an emotional state or response, how can any individual deny that a claimant has been genuinely offended? Professor Helm is right to worry that this will lead to the fracturing of society. “We all hear things we don’t like said about people and causes that we are fond of but in the changed social atmosphere we are being encouraged to give public notice if such language offends us. I am now being repeatedly told that I am entitled not to be offended. So—from now on—not offended is what I intend to be. Does this heightening of sensitivity make for social cohesion? Does not such cohesion depend rather on enduring what we don’t like, and doing so in an adult way? Does not the glue of civic peace rest on such intangibles as the ability to laugh at oneself, to take a joke about even the deepest things? And is it not a measure of the strength of a person’s religion that they tolerate the unpleasant conversation of others? Isn’t playing the offendedness card going to result in an enfeebling of the culture, the development of oversensitive and precious members of the ‘caring society’? Whatever happened to toleration?”

Given our mandate to share the Gospel and to speak openly and publicly about Jesus Christ and the Christian faith, Christians must understand a particular responsibility to protect free speech and to resist this culture of offendedness that threatens to shut down all public discourse.

Of course, the right for Christians to speak publicly about Jesus Christ necessarily means that adherents of other belief systems will be equally free to present their truth claims in an equally public manner. This is simply the cost of religious liberty.

An interesting witness to this point is Salman Rushdie, the novelist who was once put under a Muslim sentence of death because he had insulted Muslim sensibilities in his novel The Satanic Verses. Mr. Rushdie presents an argument that Christians must take seriously.

“The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other’s positions,” Rushdie insists.

As the novelist continues: “People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It is no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defense of free speech begins at the point where people say something you can’t stand. If you can’t defend their right to say it, then you don’t believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t get up your nose.”

As the Apostle Paul made clear in writing to the Corinthians, the preaching of the Gospel has always been considered offensive by those who reject it. When Paul spoke of the cross as “foolishness” and a “stumbling block” [1 Corinthians 1:23] he was pointing to this very reality—a reality that would lead to his own stoning, flogging, imprisonment, and execution.

At the same time, Paul did not want to offend persons on the basis of anything other than the cross of Christ and the essence of the Christian Gospel. For this reason, he would write to the Corinthians about becoming “all things to all people, that by all means I might save some” [1 Corinthians 9:22].

Without doubt, many Christians manage to be offensive for reasons other than the offense of the Gospel. This is to our shame and to the injury of our Gospel witness. Nevertheless, there is no way for a faithful Christian to avoid offending those who are offended by Jesus Christ and His cross. The truth claims of Christianity, by their very particularity and exclusivity, are inherently offensive to those who would demand some other gospel.

Christians must not only contend for the preservation and protection of free speech—essential for the cause of the Gospel—we must also make certain that we do not fall into the trap of claiming offendedness for ourselves. We must not claim a right not to be offended, even as we must insist that there is no such right and that the social construction of such a right will mean the death of individual liberty, free speech, and the free exchange of ideas.

Once we begin playing the game of offendedness, there is no end to the matter. There simply is no right not to be offended, and we should be offended by the very notion that such a right could exist.

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