Idiocy of political correctness
IN any given week, one could write several columns calling out the sheer lunacy of PC culture.
One of the symptoms of allowing the Left to take control of just about every taxpayer-funded institution is seeing activists relentlessly push their agenda, regardless of how absurdly out of touch it may be.
The state of play is worse in Britain and the US, but our malcontents are not far behind in adopting the most toxic elements of identity politics and victimhood culture.
Those who embrace PC ideology display an almost pathological need to be offended, personally or on behalf of others.
In the outrage era, we are becoming desensitised to these daily displays of public idiocy. If you “called bulldust” on the myriad false, exaggerated or just plain nutty claims from prominent “progressives”, you’d never get any rest.
I could’ve picked from more than a dozen examples but here are two manifestations of PC folly in Australia last week:
EDDIE MCGUIRE CENSURED FOR FUNNY JOKE
McGuire, who has Scottish ancestry, said the following to a contestant on Millionaire Hot Seat: “So you have a Jewish father and a Scottish mother? I reckon it would have been hard getting pocket money from them!”
The throwaway line was genuinely funny and bore no hint of malice but was nevertheless condemned by civil rights group, the Anti-Defamation Commission.
Comic icon Mel Brooks warned that “stupidly politically correct” culture would be “the death of comedy” and every week, the fun police expand their extensive list of what is offensive. You know something is wrong when a joke about pocket money is deemed out of bounds.
If this hypersensitivity actually led to greater tolerance and understanding, then it could be stomached, but all we achieve when we give in to the most easily offended among us is to create an insular, censorious environment where reasonable people are afraid to speak their minds.
When will social justice warriors learn that being perpetually offended and labelling everything that deviates from your world view sexist, racist or religiously intolerant only devalues those terms and diminishes real instances of bigotry?
Your inability to deal with words should not infringe on the rights of others to express themselves or the rights of those who may want to hear a joke.
British comic Rowan Atkinson has long campaigned against the “culture of censoriousness” pushed by the “outrage industry”.
“The simple truth is that in a free society, there is no right not to be offended,” he said.
“The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness … and the other represents oppression.”
PUSH TO REPLACE GENDERED TERMS IN SPORT
The Left’s desire to police language doesn’t stop at censoring comics and TV hosts.
All of us are expected to obey the twisted dogma of radical gender theory. Words such as “guys” or “boys and girls” have been deemed problematic for being exclusionary.
Last week, we learnt about a Victorian-led push, supported by the Andrews Government’s Office of Prevention and Women’s Equality, to make sports language gender-neutral to reduce violence against women.
The recommendation was for terms such as “ruckman” and “batsmen” to be replaced with “ruckperson” and “batspeople” in a bid “to discredit rigid gender roles and stereotyped constructions of masculinity and femininity”.
Bastardising the English language will not save a single woman and violence against women is too important an issue to be corrupted by activists and activist research.
The jihad against gendered terms is nothing new in Victoria. Under the Respectful Relationships program, even early-childhood teachers are told to intervene “to change gendered play”. We are following the madness in Britain where teachers at girls’ schools are told to stop referring to their pupils as “girls” or “ladies” because it will remind them of their gender – as if being female is a disability. Rita Panahi is a Herald Sun columnist