The English language is already a difficult dialect to learn, especially if it’s not someone’s native tongue. Most people who are bilingual say it is one of the more challenging languages to be taught. And now, it is getting much more complicated as political correctness adds so many confusing layers. Gender-specific pronouns are out, and people are now referred to as “it.” There are no longer two genders, but 73 and counting. Traditional titles, such as mom, dad, brother, and sister, are being tossed out and replaced with generalized terms such as parent one and parent two, and siblings. In fact, as Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson warned, PC is dangerously close to usurping our First Amendment rights, and will “destroy” the country.
Ben Carson
During a House Financial Services hearing, Carson was brought to task by Rep. Jennifer Wexton (D-VA), who took issue with a comment he had made about “big, hairy men.” Wexton and many others relate the comment as a description of transgender women, and she asked Carson to provide an apology. He refused to do so, and denied the intent of the comment, saying he had been relating a story from a HUD meeting the previous month where a women’s group told him about men entering their facility “and having to be accepted because of the rules that were in place.”
Wexton tweeted about the exchange, condemning Carson for refusing to apologize and said, “hateful words translate into discriminatory policy.”
Carson, however, has been an anti-PC advocate for years and said the trend is creating “a society where people are afraid to say what they actually believe.” During the recent meeting, the Republican rebuked Wexton and the PC agenda:
“I think this whole concept of political correctness – you can say this, you can’t say that, you can’t repeat what someone said – is total foolishness and it’s going to destroy our nation. We need to be more mature than that.”
Last year, Liberty Nation’s Jeff Charles wrote about PC in our country and cited a study titled “Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape.” The report found that 80% of the American population believes that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Yet still, somehow, the PC police are enforcing the unpopular narrative.
A Little History
While political correctness may seem like a relatively new concept, it is actually about a century old. It first appeared in 1917 in Marxist-Leninist vocabulary “following the Russian Revolution. At that time it was used to describe adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (that is, the party line).”
In the 1970s and 1980s, the term was used by liberal politicians “to refer to the extremism of some left-wing issues, particularly regarding what was perceived as an emphasis on rhetoric over content.” The conservatives took to the term in the 1990s because of the rise of liberal left-wing school curricula and methods of teaching in the US.
According to the Whorfian hypothesis, our thought processes determine our perception of reality, and that is influenced by the language we use. Because of this, language is responsible for shaping our reality and tells us how to think and respond to that reality. Language, according to the hypothesis, also promotes our biases.
Following that school of logic, instead of you are what you eat, you are what others name you. Still, as American citizens, we have the constitutional right to freedom of speech. The First Amendment wasn’t designed with PC in mind; it wasn’t created to control our thoughts and stifle our opinions. As the left batters away at our nation’s protective laws, we lose more of our rights and privileges. The ability to express an opinion should not be repressed.
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