Pro Political Correctness Quotes

We seek in one another the assurance that there is just one correct interpretation of the world, that everything is so simple that anybody can see it unless they're malicious or stupid or willfully ignorant; and we punish one another for proving with our differing conclusions that the truth is not that easy. We think we must suppress dissension to present the unified front we need to gain power over our enemies. But there are pro-life Democrats, pro-choice Christians, feminists who love their families, and conservatives who care about poor people.

The current backlash of censorship is an alliance between the Moral Majority (the Right) and the politically correct (the Left). This alliance is threatening the freedom of both women and sexual expression. The Right defines the explicit depiction of sex as evil; the Left defines it as violence against women. The result is the same.

Concern for one's political community is, of course, right and proper, and Christians can hardly be faulted for wishing to correct their nation's deficiencies. At the same time, this variety of Christian nationalism errs on at least four counts. First, it unduly applies biblical promises intended for the body of Christ as a whole to one of many particular geographic concentrations of people bound together under a common political framework. Once again this requires a somewhat dubious biblical hermeneutic. Second, it tends to identify God's norms for political and cultural life with a particular, imperfect manifestation of those norms at a specific period of a nation's history. Thus, for example, pro-family political activists tend to identify God's norms for healthy family life with the nineteenth-century agrarian family or the mid-twentieth-century suburban nuclear family. Similarly, a godly commonwealth is believed by American Christian nationalists to consist of a constitutional order limiting political power through a system of checks and balances, rather than one based on, in Walter Bagehot's words, a "fusion of powers" in the hands of a cabinet responsible to a parliament. Thus Christian nationalists, like their conservative counterparts, tend to judge their nation's present actions, not by transcendent norms given by God for its life, but by precedents in their nation's history deemed to have embodied these norms. Third, Christian nationalists too easily pay to their nation a homage due only to God. They make too much of their country's symbols, institutions, laws and mores.They see its history as somehow revelatory of God's ways and are largely blind to the outworkings of sin in that same history. When they do detect national sin, they tend to attribute it not to something defective in the nation's ideological underpinnings, but to its departure from a once solid biblical foundation during an imagined pre-Fall golden age. If the nation's beginnings are not as thoroughly Christian as they would like to believe, they will seize whatever evidence is available in this direction and construct a usable past serviceable 34 to a more Christian future. Fourth, and finally, those Christians most readily employing the language of nationhood often find it difficult to conceive the nation in limited terms. Frequently, Christian nationalists see the nation as an undifferentiated community with few if any constraints on its claims to allegiance. 45 Once again this points to the recognition of a modest place for the nation, however it be defined, and away from the totalitarian pretensions of nationalism. Whether the nation is already linked to the body politic or to an ethnically defined people seeking political recognition, it must remain within the normative limits God has placed on everything in his creation.

A bubble is a fragile thing, and often in the evening the professors talked worriedly about its bursting. They worried about political correctness, about their colleague on TV with a twenty-year-old female student screaming abuse into her face from a distance of three inches because of a disagreement over campus journalism, their colleague in another TV news story abused for not wanting to ban Pocahontas costumes on Halloween, their colleague forced to take at least one seminar’s sabbatical because he had not sufficiently defended a student’s “safe space” from the intrusion of ideas that student deemed too “unsafe” for her young mind to encounter, their colleague defying a student petition to remove a statue of President Jefferson from his college campus in spite of the repressible fact that Jefferson had owned slaves, their colleague excoriated by students with evangelical Christian family histories for asking them to read a graphic novel by a lesbian cartoonist, their colleague forced to cancel a production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues because by defining women as persons with vaginas it discriminated against persons identifying as female who did not possess vaginas, their colleagues resisting student efforts to “de-platform” apostate Muslims because their views were offensive to non-apostate Muslims. They worried that young people were becoming pro-censorship, pro-banning-things, pro-restrictions, how did that happen, they asked me, the narrowing of the youthful American mind, we’re beginning to fear the young. “Not you, of course, darling, who could be scared of you,” my mother reassured me, to which my father countered, “Scared for you, yes. Vith this Trotskyist beard you insist on wearing you look like an ice-pick target to me. Avoid Mexico City, especially de Coyoacán neighborhood. This iss my advice.” In the evenings they sat in pools of yellow light, books on their laps, lost in words. They looked like figures in a Rembrandt painting, Two Philosophers Deep in Meditation, and they were more valuable than any canvas; maybe members of the last generation of their kind, and we, we who are post-, who come after, will regret we did not learn more at their feet.

Anti-pornography (or radical) feminists will consider me a heretic-fit only for burning. Or, to put it in more politically correct terms, I am a woman who is so psychologically damaged by patriarchy that I have fallen in love with my own oppression. My arguments will be dismissed. In other words, if I enjoy pornography, it is not because I am a unique human being with different preferences. It is because I am psychologically ill.

Now anti-pornography feminists are trying to turn back the clock and shut women's sexuality away behind the locked doors of political correctness. Their first line of attack is to define the debate in their own terms. The first line of defense is to flatly reject such maneuvering.

This is the second way in which women in the industry are said to be victims of violence. They are said to be so brainwashed by white male culture that they cannot render consent. Thus, they are de facto coerced. Consider how arrogant this statement is. Although women in pornography appear to be willing, anti-porn feminists see through this charade [...] If a woman enjoys performing sex acts in front of a camera, it is not because she is a unique human being who reasons and reacts from a different background or personality. No. It is because she is psychologically damaged and no longer responsible for her actions. She must, in effect, become a political ward of radical feminists, who will make the correct choices for her.

Soros (2013) notes that the euro crisis has already transformed the EU from a free association of states enjoying equal rights to a more or less enduring relationship between debtors and creditors. The creditors risk losing a good deal of money if a member states leaves the union, while the debtors are forced to accept conditions which can only aggravate their economic depression, and place them in a subordinate position for an indefinite period of time. In this way the euro crisis threatens to destroy the EU itself. According to the American financier these are the consequences of the fatal flaw of the European monetary union: in creating the ECB as a fully independent central bank the member states indebted themselves in a currency which they cannot control. As a consequence, when the risk of a Greek default became concrete, the financial markets reacted by reducing the status of all heavily indebted members of the euro zone to that of developing countries with large debts in foreign currencies. In this way, these members of the euro zone were treated as if they alone were responsible for their present condition. The correct response to this situation, Soros concludes, would be the creation of Eurobonds and a banking union, together with the necessary structural reforms. However, Germany refuses to choose between the two alternatives: either accept the Eurobonds or leave the euro zone. On the other hand, a solution of the crisis would also require a level of centralization of the economic and fiscal policies of the member states that is, most likely, politically unfeasible. Thus the end of monetary union appears to be only a question of time, while the position of the major German parties – pro monetary union but against Eurobonds – is clearly contradictory.

In 2012, psychologists Richard West, Russell Meserve, and Keith Stanovich tested the blind-spot bias—an irrationality where people are better at recognizing biased reasoning in others but are blind to bias in themselves. Overall, their work supported, across a variety of cognitive biases, that, yes, we all have a blind spot about recognizing our biases. The surprise is that blind-spot bias is greater the smarter you are. The researchers tested subjects for seven cognitive biases and found that cognitive ability did not attenuate the blind spot. “Furthermore, people who were aware of their own biases were not better able to overcome them.” In fact, in six of the seven biases tested, “more cognitively sophisticated participants showed larger bias blind spots.” (Emphasis added.) They have since replicated this result. Dan Kahan’s work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible. He and several colleagues looked at whether conclusions from objective data were driven by subjective pre-existing beliefs on a topic. When subjects were asked to analyze complex data on an experimental skin treatment (a “neutral” topic), their ability to interpret the data and reach a conclusion depended, as expected, on their numeracy (mathematical aptitude) rather than their opinions on skin cream (since they really had no opinions on the topic). More numerate subjects did a better job at figuring out whether the data showed that the skin treatment increased or decreased the incidence of rashes. (The data were made up, and for half the subjects, the results were reversed, so the correct or incorrect answer depended on using the data, not the actual effectiveness of a particular skin treatment.) When the researchers kept the data the same but substituted “concealed-weapons bans” for “skin treatment” and “crime” for “rashes,” now the subjects’ opinions on those topics drove how subjects analyzed the exact same data. Subjects who identified as “Democrat” or “liberal” interpreted the data in a way supporting their political belief (gun control reduces crime). The “Republican” or “conservative” subjects interpreted the same data to support their opposing belief (gun control increases crime). That generally fits what we understand about motivated reasoning. The surprise, though, was Kahan’s finding about subjects with differing math skills and the same political beliefs. He discovered that the more numerate people (whether pro- or anti-gun) made more mistakes interpreting the data on the emotionally charged topic than the less numerate subjects sharing those same beliefs. “This pattern of polarization . . . does not abate among high-Numeracy subjects. Indeed, it increases.” (Emphasis in original.) It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.

For some time, an arbitrary line in the sand was drawn at the end of the first trimester as the demarcation marking the beginning of "life". Of course, advances in medical technology continued to force those who stood on that line to retreat further and further toward the beginning of gestation. For instance, it has been established that a fetus has brain waves which can be measured by EEG only 40 days after conception, and merely 18 days after conception, the fetus has a measurable heart beat. In fact, they were getting so close to the beginning of gestation, i.e., conception, that the PC pro-abortion genderists then had to adopt the more ephemeral "viability" position. Of course, according to their definition of "viability", comatose patients would not be considered human being because, in some ways, a fetus is actually more "viable" than someone who is comatose. As obstetrical and gynecological medicine continued its inevitable advance, revealing more and more about the nature of a human fetus, the pro-abortion forces continued their retreat until now they do not even discuss the fetus at all. As with all politically correct positions, if a fact gets in the way, it is simply changed or ignored. Unfortunately for the pro-abortion genderists, the fetus is a fact, a fact which is itself usually the result of "choices". Furthermore, the simple scientific fact is that at the moment of conception, the embryo is not a part of the mother's body. At that point and forever more it is a genetically distinct being with its own genetic code that is completely and totally different from every other human being who has ever lived or ever will live, including the mother. So here is the first instance of PC genderism crashing into scientific fact. It also seems ironic that while more and more law enforcement agencies in this country are now turning to DNA identification in criminal investigations and our courts are now admitting such identification as evidence in criminal prosecution, the rights of a fetus, which has its own, distinct DNA code at the moment of conception, are still not legally recognized in all cases. Now they are recognized in some cases, for there have been instances of people being prosecuted for two murders when they have killed pregnant women. There are also cases where mothers who have given birth to babies who are addicted to illegal drugs have been prosecuted, but there are no consistent standards or guidelines. It is also a macabre irony that in this country it is illegal to destroy the egg of an American bald eagle, but the government uses our tax dollars to destroy human embryos and fetuses.

What we can be sure of is that the gun debate is a boon for politicians on both sides of the aisle. Whether they are pro- or anti-gun, politicians get to use this emotionally charged issue in their bids for office. And they need never fear that the issue will go away because data suggest that the solution they debate – restricting access to guns – has no effect one way or the other. The short, but real lesson here is that even when we commit to using the powerful tool of coercion, even when we are convinced its use is utterly warranted, we might not get anything resembling the results we intended. Coercion is not a magic wand, it is simply a tool. If there is actually no effect one way or the other, as the data indicate here, the only effect coercion achieves is to limit people’s freedom. Where gun violence is concerned, coercion is simply not the correct tool for the job, and emotive posturing will never change that.

Again, though, I’m not saying this to be partisan. These are facts. And they have to be said because while I used to think school safety could be a nonpartisan issue, I am not so sure anymore. I only ever wanted to talk about school safety. I never wanted to say anything either way about guns. But because I didn’t want to only focus on guns, the politically correct media labeled me as being on the “other side of the gun debate.” As I hope this book has shown you, there are so many school safety problems that have nothing to do with guns. But if these people think that any school safety idea that isn’t about gun control is pro-gun, then I just don’t see how Democrats can ever be for school safety.