The malignant effects of political correctness on our society continue apace. I wrote a column in my old newspaper more than 20 years ago predicting that what was then the infant PC movement would lead to thought control, or attempts at it anyway, in our political discourse. Well, let me just say I told you so.
The political correctness movement was Orwellian from the start, playing with words and changing the language in ways that obfuscated reality. Janitors became custodial engineers, poor people became disadvantaged, cripples became otherly abled. As was inevitable, using the previously acceptable words soon became an offense to good taste and evidence of bigotry. So, everyone played the game and began using the often absurd synonyms that the high priests of PC ordained that we use.
Work places jumped on the bandwagon, so now, if you used one of the banned words, even privately, there was the danger of being disciplined or fired. Corporations rushed to see who could be the most PC of all. That later morphed into seeing who could be the most green, the most diverse, the most accepting of government intrusions into the private lives of workers, such as local ordinances that required companies to tell government how each employee got to work (this happened in Durham in 2000).
Soon, those who chafed at these restrictions on their freedoms just shut up and took it. At least we can believe what we believe, they wrongly assumed. But that was not to be, either. You couldn’t be against affirmative action or the radical gay agenda without being tarred as racist or homophobic. Many employers and corporations, not wanting to be associated with either of those charges, made it clear what employees had to do to think in the “right” way, even if it violated one’s religious teachings or political beliefs.
The case of writer Orson Scott Card (right, in a photo from his Wikipedia page) and gay activists who protest his being a writer for DC Comics exemplifies the downward spiral we’ve been in due to political correctness:
A writer for DC Comics‘ Superman series has come under attack by homosexual rights activists, who view his work as anti-gay and want him fired.
Orson Scott Card is one of a team of writers and artists to create the new digital DC Comics product, “Adventures of Superman,” according to a report from Fox News. Mr. Card is a Mormon and vocal opponent of gay marriage. Fox News reported he once referred to same-sex marriage as the end of democracy in American and suggested “the left is at war with the family.”
Mr. Card also wrote: “Same-sex attraction is not a strait jacket; people’s desires change over time; gay people still have choices; a reproductive dysfunction like same-sex marriage is not a death sentence for your DNA or for your desire to have a family in which children grow up with male and female parents to model appropriate gender roles,” Fox News reported.
For those who don’t know, Card is a world-renowned science-fiction writer, author of the mega-successful books Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead. He lives in Greensboro and writes a weekly column for The Rhinoceros Times, a Greensboro weekly that includes once each month a 16-page edition of the John Locke Foundation’s Carolina Journal.
Thousands of gay activists are petitioning DC to fire Card, but, to their credit, the comic book company seems to be resisting:
Fox News reports that DC Comics is so far standing by Mr. Card’s “personal views.”
And that’s the point. They are his personal views. He’s not out physically harming gays, or keeping them from getting employed, or even married. He’s just expressed his views that are based on his religious beliefs. But beliefs that go against the multicultural ethos of our times are becoming, in the view of those who push political correctness, tantamount to hate crimes.
If you sat down and dreamed up a concept and an ideology designed to destroy free speech and freedom of thought you couldn’t come up with a better one than political correctness.
