It will be a bumpy ride; so fasten your seat belts

The Iron-Fisted Tyranny of Political Correctness

by REGIS NICOLL

In the span of a few years, the dictatorship of relativism has given way to the tyranny of political correctness. Under the first regime, universal truth was supplanted by personal truth; under the current one, it is exchanged for outright falsehood. Consider the rise of statements such as,

Sexual orientation is inborn and fixed.Gender is not inborn or fixed, or binary.Homosexuality is not abnormal, unnatural, or disordered.Marriage is a matter of love not gender.Children flourish as well (or better!) with same sex caregivers as with their biological parents.Islamic terrorism is not driven by religion.

Each is factually false (as are all politically correct statements) and, yet, advanced through tautology, pimped out in sophistic lip gloss, and enforced by intimidation, has become Western orthodoxy. So entrenched is the groupthink that those who challenge it can find themselves outside of the camp of polite company.

Think not? At your next social gathering, try explaining why you believe marriage is not the right to marry “whomever you love.” If the guests don’t blanch as if a skunk had leapt out of your pocket, it will set off a wave of fidgeting even among Christians who have made rationalizations for gay friends or relatives or who fear coming across as bigoted and intolerant.

The Cost of Dissent

While sharing your beliefs over cocktails can result in social shunning, owning a business, supporting a cause, or belonging to an organization that runs afoul the PC canon puts you at risk for everything from public shaming to loss of livelihood.

Just ask bakery owners Aaron and Melissa Klein who were fined and put out of business, not for refusing to serve homosexual customers, but for declining to create a cake for a same-sex wedding.

Or David and Jason Benham who lost their popular HGTV program, Flip it Forward, for statements David made about genderless marriage. Statements that would have been uncontroversial a decade ago, and, in fact, were uncontroversial in 2008 when presidential nominee Barak Obama told Rick Warren, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.”

Or Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV’s Fixer Upper, who were threatened with the cancelation of their show and financial ruin, not for anything they had said or done, but for membership in a church that affirms the natural heterosexual design of marriage.

Then there’s the state of North Carolina that is being boycotted by entertainers, professional sports organizations, and Fortune 500 companies for legislation that, in accordance with physical reality and common sense, protects girls in rest rooms from the prurient enthusiasms of males.

Most recently, St. Joseph’s Healthcare System, a Catholic institution, is being sued for declining to perform an elective hysterectomy on a transgender woman.

As PC agitations have spread from the boardroom to the bedroom to the bathroom, many people have chosen to remain silent or self-censure their remarks to avoid the untoward attention of the thought police. It all serves an Alice in Wonderland reality with a history.

Tracing the roots

The PC culture is a product of progressivism that approaches reality as a social construct that must be changed to achieve the claimed progressive ends of prosperity and peace. Originating under communism, political correctness was institutionalized in the 1930’s to promote the Party’s reality “above reality itself,” writes Claremont Institute senior fellow Angelo M. Codevilla.

For all progressive movements, the supernal reality is the creation of a new humanity in a utopian existence where all conflicts and contradictions are resolved: in Communism, by dismantling all class distinctions; in Freudianism, by overcoming sexual repression; in social liberalism, by gaining public acceptance for any and all lifestyle choices; in secularism, by exalting science and extinguishing religion. Each requires a revolution against realities that do not bend to the “realities” of progressives.

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