David McDonagh on Political Correctness

A few weeks when totalitarian Political Correctness, again, has been celebrated on the mass media.

In the last few weeks we have had a superabundance of Political Correctness [PC] in the media. The idea seems to be to foster a mass, or a mob, reaction to affirm the crass ideal of equality of sexes, races, ages, of religions and of lifestyle choices that must all be respected: unless they happen to flout PC ideals. Indeed, the PC need is held to be the more direly needed if nasty bigots [nowadays meaning anyone who does not conform to PC] do not want to conform in this way. The PCers usually think that time is on their side and they tend to get a bit upset when they realise that this might not be the case. Then they usually cite the year, as if the offenders, the nasty bigots, might reform, after all, if only they could fully comprehend what year it is. Today, the PC ideologues will be saying something like, “this is still going on in 2011!”

The PC ideal is equality and that clashes with liberty. Instead of allowing men to express any opinion of women that they see fit, an elementary civil liberty which seems to have been retained for the opinions of women about men, just as it has for the minority races, whom might speak freely, or at least a little freer than the whites, the formerly dominant group can. Many may think that most of the time the PC outlook was out to have a go at whites for the supposed sins of their fathers, if not for their own sins of late, to regress the balance to compensate for the past.   However, the purists amongst the PCers will be all too keen to agree with the idea that all should conform to PC mores and laws. They will wish to limit free speech even more than they have achieved so far

PC does not quite succeed, as few in the general public respond the way the politicians and the pundits on the media seem to want, but the PC drive is still unpleasantly totalitarian if not as successful with the general public as the PC ideologues would wish. . That Political Correctness has yet to be accepted displays to the PC ideologues that their sacred mission is all the more urgent.

The time was when football was thought to be a boy’s or a men’s game but those days women present it on TV and in the newspapers too, whether this is apt or not. Men have to lump it if they do not like it. But it is not just the reporting side but there are now linesmen who are female too. So the females are now even on the pitch. Why? Because PC ideology holds that it is only fair that any job is open to one and all, as we are all basically equal. That it might not be what people want to see is neither here or there, those who do not like PC are held by the ideologues to be bigots, or Neanderthal, so all the more reason that they should have to lump it. They need to catch up.    Political Correctness is that no one should ever discriminate on any basis whatsoever. This daft dogma overlooks that to discriminate is to think and that to choose, on any basis whatsoever, is an elementary civil liberty.

As to think is to discriminate; even the silly PC ideologues do discriminate all the time. To act is to choose and to discriminate between options is a prerequisite of any human action whatsoever. To end discrimination would need an end to human life. But the PC ideologues plead; they only mean some forms of special types of discrimination., that they feel to have caused injustice in the  past.  But their crass ideal of equality has no reality outside of mathematics. It is alien to anything societal, despite the fact that the neo-religion of sociology has it as a sacred dogma, as does its ugly sister that we call psychology. PC is as rampant in those “disciplines” as rampant as the Green ideology is in ecology. The colleges themselves, despite charging ever rising fees, seek to rule the students by PC dogma rather than serve them as if they were truly on the market place.   They have long since abandoned the free speech that one might think is essential to any serious enquiry. .

When it comes to dealing with the vulgar masses outside the colleges, it is enough for the PC totalitarians that football is male dominated for it to be condemned as being such, but why should it not be? It is a game played by boys and some grown men. Why should females be introduced? Apart from crass PC dogma, there is no reason at all why females should go into football.

Sky Sports have sacked Andy Gray for making suggestions to a female to aid him to adjust his dress, a clip that was released in the wake of the response to his comments on a female not being able to grasp the offside rule that was in an earlier leaked clip.  Many of the PC pundits have bring up their past success against Ron Atkinson some years back now. He made a few racialist comments about black players in his team.

As some who worked for Sky leaked the clips to the media Gray may well have had many who wanted him sacked at Sky but the public import is that there should be limits on free speech and that any discrimination on sex or race is wrong. That is mere arbitrary dogma that limits civil liberty.

It is reported in the UK press that both Andy Gray and Richard Keys were unpopular with the general public as well as with some who worked at Sky. Gabby Logan, as TV sports presenter, moans in The Times that the two PC sinners are not untypical in their outlook, that she has often been told that she should not reporting on football and that when she said she was not being stretched enough by the jobs that she was given, she was told that only a baby would truly fulfil her desires.  Jacuelin Maynay moaned that in Australia she was told to go home and wash the dishes by Aussie rules Rugby coach Danny Frawley. But as one in five who attend are now female this cannot be tolerated, says Robert Booth in The Guardian. He seems to overlook that four out of five remain male. It does not seem to matter to the PC fools whether their totalitarian PC outlook abuses the male majority. Indeed, PC is most ironic in always being offensive when it pretends not to be, and if any “bigot” should object to it then that only displays to the PC ideologue how very badly his crass dogmas are needed.  The wider public still direly need to catch up with the modern PC mores and laws. They need to be educated they say, as if there was much to learn in the simple-minded content of the PC dogmas.

As we saw of late, Roman Catholicism can be flouted either on adoption at the Catholic Adoption Agencies, or on whom is acceptable to be admitted into a guesthouse. Rod Liddle remains largely PC, despite his occasional heresy. In The Sunday Times 26 January 2011 he said: “Congratulations to Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, who have won the right for all homosexuals to stay in bed and breakfast establishments run by pig-headed Christians”. Indeed, all too often a statement that they are basically right nearly always prefaces any doubt thrown on the PC dogmas. As Karl Marx once said, even a critical theologian remains a theologian. It needs to be realised that PC is a totalitarian tyranny that scotches liberty whenever it is reinforced by the law. In the case of the refusal to let two homosexuals stay overnight, Bristol County Court found the discriminating owners, Peter and Hazelmary Bull guilty of “direct discrimination” at their Cornwall guesthouse back in September of 2008. On the Moral Maze, radio 4, Wednesday 26 January, a few on the panel had some sympathy for the Bulls. But in the Guardian the journalists mainly, if not fully, agree with Liddle. There, Ben Summerskill said he felt it was on par with putting up a notice saying “No blacks. No Irish”. Why should the “bigots” be any more entitled to exempt themselves from equality legislation than from health and safety laws? The ruling keeps private prejudice out of a public place, he said. It thereby extends totalitarian crassness, the crass thinking behind PC and all the equality laws that need to be repealed if ever we are to have civil liberty. If liberty mattered then they should never have been passed in the first place. The PC ideologues look at the feelings or what they imagine to be the feeling of the rejected but thereby overlook the liberty of everyone to be able to reject; they oppress the dog to aid the tail of the dog. What they might do to see clearer is to look at the whole picture as they are not even living up to their ideal of equality but actually privileging those they assume to be victims.

Most of the Health and Safety laws are no better. Maybe a few of them relating to real diseases like cholera or food hygiene make sense but, clearly, most of them are not just silly but even quite insane, as are all the traditional great religions.   Most people seem to see those things clearly enough but they also feel that religion needs the undue respect and they fail to see that the state and statuary law as an unmitigated menace to one and all.

Baroness Warsi, who has been promoted to be the new Conservative chairman, and given a place in the cabinet, owing to a direly felt PC need to conform to what they mistake as the modern world, by the Conservative Party and their current and recent leadership, made the news last week. She accused the broad UK native population of Islamophobia, a meme that is something of a wild joker in the PC card deck of crass dogmas, as to respect Islam is just to flout nearly all the other PC values. PC has this totalitarian need to be uniform on those things but it is most unrealistic for its ideologues to think that it ever can be so. Where common sense suggests the old idea of “live and let live”, the ideology of PC stresses, instead, a need to get us all to conform to unrealistic standards that no one actually wants instead of keeping the law out of social life and allowing people to freely adjust as they see fit. The PC Conservative chairman spoke out at the University of Leicester, putting forward her “dinner table test” for at dinner in the UK it was acceptable to hate Islam, she said. Norman Tebbit, who had his earlier “cricket test” that the chairman might have aped somewhat, replied that there was even more hatred of Christianity in the Mosques than there was in the churches about Islam. He suggested that she should shut up for a while.

Peter Oborne, writing in The Daily Telegraph, thought Tebbit went too far there and that he had got it dead wrong, as Oborne thought that what Sayeeda Warsi said “has desperately needed saying by a mainstream politician for a very long time”. Oborne feels that the Muslims he knows are all decent people with a clear-eyed appreciation of what it means to be a British citizen.  Yet they are routinely reviled and not only by BNP members. Polly Toynbee openly declares that: “I am an Islamophobe and proud of it”. Had she said that she was an anti-Semite in such boastful terms, she would have been out of a job, says Oborne.   Another Guardian writer, Giles Frazier, tends to agree with Oborne. He fears a slippery slope to the chief PC sin. The dinner party bigots begin on Muslim ideas and human rights but they soon slide into Islamophobia and even outright racism, he exclaims. But others in the UK press, like Minette Martin in The Sunday Times, hold that as 36% of Muslims say that converting out of Islam should be punished by the death sentence is a reasonable concern to be fearful about, not withstanding all the other illiberal aspects of Islam today.  Damning the backward religion is not at one with damning the people. To fear the march of the religion is simply plain sense.

In the middle of January, the aging Miriam O’Reilly won an ageism case and she had to be reinstated by the BBC’s Countryfile programme as a result. She was on the screens again in her old place within a week. She had been dropped to be replaced by a female a bit younger and a lot better looking. The optimistic PCers saw this as a great win but the pessimists amongst them lamented that it was only one case and that what they disapprove of will continue to be the norm, even if more gingerly. That silly PC floats everyday reality is true, so the pessimists amongst the PCers are most likely right, but why should anyone have to tolerate their laws? The right to discriminate is an elementary civil liberty and Political Correctness is a tyranny.

The accommodation of one and all with diverse outlooks was always a part of common sense that had mild mores against all religious or political conversation on the idea that it might lead to conflict. The movement that was widely named Politically Correct in the late 1980s may well have got its impetus from this aspect of common sense but with common sense people always knew its limits and that to flout them would to be to go beyond common sense. This PC movement went way beyond common sense by becoming an offensive movement with its own jargon of racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, Islamophobia and the like. It can only create trouble by holding that the general public is largely made up of bigots and it has no chance of ever getting rid of normal inequality any more than Christianity ever had the slightest chance of getting rid of what it called sin. Indeed, the similar aim of both Christianity & Political Correctness seems to be to put up a set of impossible standards such  that they can be sure that most people will fall short of, so that they can indulge in the condemnation of the sinners or bigots respectively. This might well give the ideologues a self-righteous satisfaction.  But when they get statute laws to back them up they flout liberty.   It is the unacceptable face of totalitarianism. If the CON DEMS want to save money they could hardly do better than to repeal all the PC laws and to cease to fund the PC totalitarian Commissions.