Posts Tagged ‘ political correctness ’

The Society of Professional Journalists Goes Full-bore PC

October 1, 2011
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The Society of Professional Journalists Goes Full-bore PC

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” — Through the Looking Glass (1872) Evidently, the SPJ agrees with Humpty: The Society of Professional Journalists voted this week to impose even more political correctness when they passed a resolution to urge newsrooms to drop the terms “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant,” saying that only courts can decide when a person has committed an illegal act. Their logic is elusive: Aguilar said that the terms insult Latinos who are or who had once been in the U.S. illegally, citing the case of her mother who became a citizen in 1980. That’s right. It’s insulting to be called illegal when you broke the law by entering the country illegally. Heaven forbid that we should insult criminals. From the SPJ resolution: “WHEREAS only the court system, not reporters and editors, can decide when a person has committed an illegal act and;

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A Western Government Declares BC/AD To Be Un-PC

September 13, 2011
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A Western Government Declares BC/AD To Be Un-PC

— and some people aren’t at all happy about it: Australia is to remove the birth of Jesus as a reference point for dates in school history books. Under the new politically correct curriculum, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini) will be replaced with BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). The Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, yesterday condemned the move as an ‘intellectually absurd attempt to write Christ out of human history.’ He described the phrase ‘common era’ as ‘meaningless,’ and compared it to using ‘festive season’ instead of Christmas. The changes, introduced by the government, were supposed to be pushed through next year, but have been delayed by the row. The terms CE and BCE have been popularised in academic and scientific publications. One of Australia’s political party leaders, Christopher Pyne, also registered his objections: ‘Australia is what it is today because of the foundations of our nation in the Judeo-Christian heritage that we inherited from Western civilization,’ he said. ‘Kowtowing to political correctness by the embarrassing removal of AD and BC in our national curriculum is of a piece with the fundamental flaw of trying to deny who we are as a people,’

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Mini-quote: The Memorial with PC Amnesia

July 8, 2011
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Mini-quote: The Memorial with PC Amnesia

This Sept. 11, the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks upon America, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will dedicate the massive, $600 million National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center. What Americans have not been told is that this “memorial” will remake Ground Zero so that it does not acknowledge 9/11. Instead of acting as a constant reminder of the attacks, a symbol for us and future generations of the evil that struck, the death and destruction it caused and the heroism and sacrifice in response, the memorial will wipe out all evidence and memory of the attacks. . . . . It will not include the initials FDNY, NYPD or PAPD. It will not include the words “firefighter” or “police officer.” Recognizing the heroism and sacrifice of the firefighters and police officers would contrast those virtues with the barbarism and crime of the terrorists. And though Mr. Bloomberg has said our values demand a Ground Zero Mosque, he will not allow the Rev. Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain who died while praying the Lord’s Prayer in the lobby of WTC 1, to be identified as “Fire Chaplain Father” Mychal Judge. It is only traditional

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‘Living in the Shadows’? More Like Casting a Very Long One

March 24, 2011
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‘Living in the Shadows’? More Like Casting a Very Long One

By Mike Gray Political correctness can lead to some amazingly warped situations: Los Angeles Police Department officers manning sobriety checkpoints will no longer, as a matter of department policy, impound cars driven by unlicensed drivers. That is unless the unlicensed driver is a United States citizen or lawful resident, in which case he can say adios to his car for 30 days, as authorized by California law. I can see you out there shaking your heads and saying, “Wait a minute . . . .”  Yes, you read it correctly: Two drivers are stopped at a sobriety checkpoint in Los Angeles and both are found to be sober, but lacking a driver’s license. The first, a U.S. citizen, receives a citation and stands by and watches as his car is towed away to the impound yard, where it will remain for a month so as to impress upon him that driving is a privilege, not a right, and that the people of the state of California extend that privilege only to those who have demonstrated some minimal level of proficiency as signified by possession of a driver’s license. The second unlicensed driver, an illegal immigrant from, let’s just say Mexico,

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Everything Is Just Fine in Arizona — Not!

October 15, 2010
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Everything Is Just Fine in Arizona — Not!

by Mike Gray Darrell Ankarlo lives in Arizona, but thanks to federal incompetence he’s finding it harder to enjoy it there: . . . may I ask bleeding hearts what they don’t understand about the word “Illegal”? If you have six people in your family and I barge into your home and demand to be the seventh none of you would tolerate it. Currently, millions of people from 52 nations have barged into our American family and demanded to stay with the majority of them stealing our jobs, killing our hospitals and corrupting our laws. Now is either the time to roll over, play dead and let the victor take the spoils or it’s time to resist the invasion. Is political correctness warping common sense? Ankarlo thinks so: I guess if you lived in a state that is nearing bankruptcy you would join our fight, not laugh at it. I suppose if you lived in Phoenix where our insurance rates are through the roof because we are #1 in stolen vehicles—with most heading south you would express empathy. Oh, yeah, and we’re #1 in kidnappings in America and #2 in the world—THE WORLD! So, when we create yet another law, SB1070,

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Does Morality Have Any Bearing on “Immigration” Policy — And What About the Law?

September 17, 2010
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Does Morality Have Any Bearing on “Immigration” Policy — And What About the Law?

by Mike Gray Justice is no longer blind in America — it is politically correct imbroglio. — Larrey Anderson Anderson was an eyewitness to court proceedings that revealed just how screwed up the legal system has become thanks to entrenched attitudes about illegal “immigration”: Our continued tolerance of illegal immigration is as unconscionable as America’s former acceptance of slavery. While the ethical implications of the treatment of illegal immigrants are quite complex, the solution to the problem of illegal immigration is simple. Anderson’s “simple” solution: Here’s how we stop illegal immigration: enforce our laws fairly, to the letter, and equitably. If there’s no will to enforce the laws, however, the situation will never change. Too many special interest groups and too much money are already in play; enforcing the laws would require rooting them and their influence out of the system, which, I’m afraid, is highly unlikely.

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Prof. Howell Reinstated at UI … For Now

August 1, 2010
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The Good Guys won this round. Prof. Kenneth Howell, who was fired from the University of Illinois for teaching Catholic dogma in an “Introduction to Catholicism” course, has been reinstated … for now.

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Professor Fired for Teaching Catholic Belief in a Catholic Class

July 20, 2010
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Professor Fired for Teaching Catholic Belief in a Catholic Class

By Daniel Crandall Here’s yet another case of reality intruding where only the satirical newspaper, The Onion, once trod. An adjunct professor at the University of Illinois was fired for explaining Catholic beliefs concerning Natural Law to students enrolled in a class about Catholicism. Howell, who taught Introduction to Catholicism and Modern Catholic Thought, says he was fired at the end of the spring semester after sending an e-mail explaining some Catholic beliefs to his students preparing for an exam. What bit of pedagogy was so verboten that the University of Illinois could no longer abide Prof. Howell’s presence on campus? That would be nothing less than the Church’s teaching concerning homosexual behavior: “Natural Moral Law says that Morality must be a response to REALITY…. In other words, sexual acts are only appropriate for people who are complementary, not the same.” This bit of Catholic doctrine so offended one student that it resulted in an anonymous message being sent to religion department head Robert McKim complaining of, you guessed it, “hate speech.” The complaining student, however, isn’t even in Prof. Howell’s class: An unidentified . . . student claimed to be a friend of the offended student. The

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Carnage That College Ignores

April 16, 2010
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Carnage That College Ignores

Guest writer Malcolm Kline notes that U.S. academia routinely ignores the enormity of the crimes of Communists while harping on the faults of the United States. Storied Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once famously said that one man’s death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. He and his successors compiled so many human statistics that the unfortunately few academics and intellectuals who are trying to ascertain the true number are still working on it. “One cannot discuss the past, present, or future while they lay there unacknowledged,” University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors pointed out in a speech to the Atlas Foundation last November. “We are surrounded by slain innocents and the scale is wholly new.” “This is not the thousands of the Inquisition, it is not the thousands of American lynching, this is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination.” Kors is the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). “The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend—scores and scores and scores and scores of millions of bodies, all around us,” Kors said on November 9, 2009. “Martin Malia, author of The Soviet Tragedy, with only partial views of

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‘Criminal Minds’ Episode Borders on Contemptible

April 15, 2010
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‘Criminal Minds’ Episode Borders on Contemptible

Last Wednesday’s installment of Criminal Minds, “A Right of Passage,” is a perfect example of Hollywood’s unending infatuation with liberal-progressive causes strained through a politically correct filter and served up just in time for the present administration’s anticipated new push for amnesty for illegal aliens. A series of decapitations along the volatile border with Marxico prompts the Behavioral Analysis Unit to board their cool Gulfstream execujet and chase after this malefactor. Santa Muerte (The Saint of Death), a legendary figure among the locals, is reputed to be responsible, but our invariably secular FBI agents know better. Somebody’s killing members of a politically privileged ethnic group, and even at Mach 0.9 our heroes can’t get there fast enough. Considering how chaotic the southern U.S. border is reported to be, the occasional murder should come as no surprise. But if it isn’t Santa Muerte, then who could it be? Senior Agent David Rossi (Joe Mantegna) opines that it probably isn’t the Minutemen because that would be bad PR for them. Thanks for that insightful analysis, Agent Rossi: The Minutemen are constrained from murdering each and every illegal alien solely because it wouldn’t look good on the six o’clock news—patriotism, humanitarian impulses, Christian charity, and

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Notre Dame Doesn’t Know What It Lost

March 23, 2010
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Notre Dame Doesn’t Know What It Lost

Catholic writer George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center takes Notre Dame to task for failing to acknowledge adequately the recent death of Ralph McInerny, arguably one of the greatest men of letters to spend his professional career in the shadow of that  school’s “Touchdown Jesus.” Notre Dame did publish a respectful obituary at the Jacques Maritain Center webpage, but that’s the only obituary I could locate at the university’s extensive website. I stumbled upon it through Google, searching specifically for “Notre Dame Ralph McInerny Obituary.” Trying to find it from the school’s homepage is frustrating to say the least. Back to Weigel’s take on Notre Dame’s response to this great man’s passing: The university Web site posted a nicely written obituary three days after his death, but there was little sense in the university’s official recognition of its loss that a gigantic figure had left the scene. One cannot help suspect that this has something to do with the fact that Ralph thought Notre Dame had gone off the rails in its dogged and relentlessly self-promoting attempts to measure itself against what it likes to term “peer schools,” such as Dartmouth and Yale. What Ralph understood, and

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Is ’30 Rock’ Racist?

December 9, 2009
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Is ’30 Rock’ Racist?

It’s gotta be, right? Just look at all that bling on Tracey Jordan. Almost as fun as watching 30 Rock is watching liberals laugh and then think (out loud on their blogs): “Does laughing at the antics of Tracy Morgan make me racist? This might be, at best, a guilty pleasure, and perhaps I shouldn’t be enjoying it. Because, well, real racists might enjoy these jokes, too.” That’s not a direct quote of Philly-based blogger Isaiah Thompson, but close enough. He raises the question of whether we really should be laughing at the jokes and story lines of two of America’s most celebrated and successful television comedies: 30 Rock and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Thompson writes: Anybody else feel like TV’s been getting uncomfortably, overtly racist? See? I said I was close enough. To be fair, Thompson backs off from that question later in his brief blog post: But I don’t really buy it. And yeah, I’m the who’s ruining the joke by talking about it: but of the many things that make Curb and 30 Rock hilarious, I gotta say: black people playing crazy black people doesn’t top my list. So … Thompson apparently feels so much guilt about

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