POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, A DEFINITION

I remember when the term “politically correct” first started. It seemed simple enough. It was like your mother or your grandmother saying to you, “Don’t say things like that, they’re not nice.” Or “Don’t call people names because it just isn’t a nice thing to do.” Now who could object to this softening of our language? What could be wrong with not objectifying certain groups or certain ideas just because they were out of the mainstream? Well, like so many things that start out with good intentions, the rest of the story has now to be told.

There is a difference between objectifying and identifying. I’ll give you an example which happened recently. A bad guy was ripping off ladies in a shopping center parking lot by telling them they had a problem with their car. He would volunteer to repair it for a sum of money. To make a long story short, he didn’t fix anything and took off with the money. The police asked the TV station to broadcast his description so they could catch him. The station did the broadcast but refused to say whether he was white, black, Asian, or any other identifier that could possibly be construed as politically incorrect. The bad guy was eventually captured but not because of the broadcast. He just got too greedy and got caught. Identifying him would not objectify him. But even if it did, what is wrong with telling everyone he is just a low life crook who preys on women? Telling the viewing audience his race would  only serve to help identify him.

I believe this new attempted restriction on human interaction has a more insidious motive. It has become a mechanism for control. If any group can control your speech, they can also control your thoughts. Consider, for example, hate crimes. How ridiculous is that? If a person kills a homosexual because he is a homosexual, it really doesn’t matter whether the killer loves or hates the victim, the victim is still just as dead regardless of the emotion of the killer. Murder is a crime and it doesn’t need any other description. The killer needs to be dealt with because of his actions, not his thoughts.

Recently a family of Muslims in Canada was found guilty of murdering their children because those children had, in the families’ view, become too westernized. The family felt justified in killing them because of their strict religious conviction. Our national media refused to identify the family as Muslims because they thought that would be politically incorrect. Let’s face it, did anybody think these were Baptists?  This was a so-called “honor killing.”  Identifying murderers as murderers is not politically incorrect regardless of their religion especially when their religion is also their motive. Stupidity under any guise is still stupidity and failing to report stupidity for any reason is equally wrong. The inventors of political correctness should be ashamed.

The real troubling part of this is that it is not going away. Normally ridiculous concepts like this die under their own weight. Not political correctness however. The self proclaimed arbiters of what is right and good for the unwashed masses will not let it. By the way, you will not likely find many of them at a Tea Party rally. You probably will not see them at any function of the Republican Party. No, this is definitely a liberal leftist concept. Conceived by and propagated by the liberals, they see political correctness as their crowning achievement of control.

I try to be careful when I write or talk. I try to be fair. But, the only control on my words is the control I place on myself. If some person or group is offended, that’s just too damn bad. I have freedom of speech and thought and so do you. I refuse to cede my freedoms to a bunch of people who believe they know what is best and neither should you.

Ron Scarbro February 22, 2012.