Saturday, February 11, 2006

The Nigger Boys Sunset Saloon and other Stories..

The title of this blog is the name of a barbers shop in Butare, Rwanda's second city - and a very popular place it is too. If I put such a sign up in Edmonton, the political correctness police would be all over me like a tonne of bricks.

If I were to say that homosexuals are "not acceptable" and are "immoral" and that same sex marriage "damages the very fabric of society" and suggest that these views were the views dominant in the Muslim world, I would probably be told I needed to educate myself about the Muslim faith. But these exact statements were made by Sir Iqbal Sacranie, one of the leaders of the Muslim faith in Europe, and are seen by most Muslim's as moderate statements. (Interestingly, the arabic language does not have a term for "gay" - instead those who are gay are referred to in terms of "shouzouz jinsi", which means unnatural love, though more modern arabs refer to gays in terms of "Ahrer el jins" which means "queers").

Sir Iqbal is now been investigated by British police for the hate crime of homo-phobia. Think about this for a moment. Sir Iqbal is outlining the views of his religion - for which he can now be prosecuted. Pope Benedict beware.

It gets worse. Birmingham University's Christian Union has been told that it must admit people from other faiths, since it is not permitted on a University campus to exclude people by virtue of their religion. This after 76 years of doing precisely that. They have also been told that it is now illegal to advertise the Union as open to "men and women", since this disadvantages and discriminates against transgender and transexual individuals. The advice is to advertise as being open "to persons of all genders and persuasions" - not exactly inline with most Christian thinking.

This all rather reminds me of Diane Rvaitch's book The Language Police (NY: Knopf, 2003). In an assault on political correctness, Diane looked at what happened to school text books in America in the 1990's onwards and she documents how the language police have radically changed the way in which events and realities are described. Classic works by Shakespeare, Poe and many others have been sanitized so as not to cause offence.

Ray Bradbury, a great author, ranted and raved against these developments, but to no avail. Censorship is rife throughout America and Canada and is growing in the developed world.

And then there is the liberal education industry, well described by Dinesh D'Souza in the book Illiberal Education (NY: Vintage Books, 1992). The development of political correctness, especially in terms of race and sexual orientation and relationships, has been rife in our Universities.

So then we come to the idea that newspapers protect free speech. I dont think so, since they too are constrained and not just by the laws of libel, but by their "best guess" at what political correctness looks like for their readers. While this is "self censorship", it is growingly the case that hate laws and related laws of human "rights" (sic) act as points for censorship and caution.

Here are some of the changes voluntarily imposed by the media and others:

  • The term server is increasingly used for a person of either gender who waits tables.
    Chairman was replaced by chair, chairperson (or president or some other term). (The term chair has its own history within academia.)
  • Fireman was replaced by fire fighter.
  • Fisherman has been replaced by "fisher".
  • Congressman was replaced by member of congress. The former remains in use for male members of congress, however.
  • Policeman became policewoman when referring to females; then the term police officer was introduced for both genders.
  • Likewise, Army wife, Navy wife, etc., are now Army spouse, etc. (Occasionally male civilian spouses of military members will ironically refer to themselves as Navy wives, etc.)
  • "To boldly go where no man has gone before", from the introductory sequence of Star Trek: The Original Series, was changed to "To boldly go where no one has gone before" in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
  • "Man does not live by bread alone" became "People do not live on bread alone" in the 1996 NIV Inclusive Language Edition of the Bible, Matthew 4:4.
  • Airlines no longer use the term stewardess (nor steward for men), partly due to disparaging stereotypes and the condescending nickname stews. Thus they have replaced it with the gender-neutral term flight attendant. As is the case within nursing, male members of the profession, who are the minority, are typically referred to by their gender (e.g. male flight attendant as opposed to flight attendant for females.)
  • The word sex has largely been replaced with the word gender, though gender classically did not mean male/female, but rather it referred to grammatical masculine/feminine constructs ("steward" vs. "stewardess", or "actor" vs. "actress", for example). The word sex seems to have become an impolite or emotion-charged term, at least in part because it is prevailing verbal shorthand for sexuality and sexual intercourse.
  • Lacking a gender-neutral alternative, many actresses now prefer the term "actor" when defining their profession, thus eventually likely rendering the term gender-neutral through common usage.
  • TIME Magazine's Man of the Year became Person of the Year regardless of which gender wins it (there had been "Women of the Year" in the past).
  • The phrase "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me", attributed to Jesus, is frequently changed to "Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me."
  • Miss and Mrs. have been supplemented by Ms., providing a word that does not indicate marital status. The term was ridiculed by many when it was first introduced in the 1970s, but over time it has become common usage.
  • The 1960s-1970s TV show The Dating Game needed terms for unmarried contestants; bachelor was obvious, but the feminine "equivalent" was the negatively-charged term "spinster", which was only more slightly polite than "old maid"; so the show either coined or popularized the term bachelorette, which has since come into common usage.
  • The time-honored "I now pronounce you man and wife" at weddings has largely been replaced by "I now pronounce you husband and wife". Some etymologists find this amusing, as "wife" is Old English for "woman", while "husband" is Old English for "householder"; the original expression was meant to define a moment when both members of a couple officially and legally became equally committed to adulthood.
    Generalized uses of man when referring to humanity (mankind) are frequently replaced by gender-neutral terms.

I will not mention the cartoons of the prophet which have led to riots, burning of the Danish embassy in one country and other problems world-wide. But the idea that we have free speech and we are trying to defend it is absurd. We lost it a long time ago. As one of my hero's has said political correctness "is the language of cowardice" (Billy Connolly).

By the way, colleagues in the UK are running a Campaign Against Political Correctness - for details see http://www.capc.co.uk/ - I may even start a Canadian chapter..anyone interested?

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