Word Control

Words are my tools. And my playthings. A big part of my life. I appreciate a good word, a good phrase, a good sentence. I try to write powerful words, but mostly fall short. Still, sometimes I read some older pieces and think, that was well written. Good for me—and the inspiration that was with me at that moment of writing.

So, because of my interest in words, I’m interested in freedom of speech, and I pay attention when words and ideas are oppressed or suppressed.

image from here

A week or so ago a friend posted on Facebook a piece called, “Why I’m Teaching My Kids to be ‘Politically Correct.’” My Facebook friend is a young mom, non-religious and not very political (but probably leaning liberal and/or libertarian). I know her to be a good person, trying to live a decent life and contributing well to her family and society. Knowing that, I read this piece trying to see what appealed to my friend, to learn from that.

There’s this paragraph near the beginning, that I can almost agree with:

As a writer, I think constantly about how words are being used, and from where I’m sitting, political correctness has gotten conflated in recent years with common decency, kindness, and consideration. On one hand, anyone who dares to acknowledge people who say they’ve been hurt, or who suggests that demonizing an entire group of people is a bad idea, is automatically derided for being “politically correct.” And on the other hand, people will say any awful thing that floats into their mind, claiming that they are “just being honest,” and then when challenged, they will cry about political correctness. (For the record, speaking your mind isn’t a virtue if what’s on your mind is bigoted, obnoxious, or insulting. It’s just rude.)

The problem is, indeed, that political correctness has been conflated with “common decency, kindness, and consideration.” That’s what has given political correctness power—because we decent, kind, considerate people don’t want to be misunderstood or mislabeled as bigoted and hateful. But in reality political correctness isn’t about politeness or consideration for others; it has the purpose of shutting down voices that don’t align with the viewpoint being enforced.

The author of the piece decides to keep the incorrectly conflated definition of political correctness, and insists she will teach her children to be politically correct—because words do have power to hurt, and we should at least make an effort not to offend or be rude. Her complaint is that so many people are sick and tired of political correctness being shoved down their throats that they eschew any controls, even self-control, over what they say:

The war on political correctness has become a scapegoat for people to regress to a less open and tolerant era, as evidenced by the amount of blatant racism, sexism, prejudice, and hatred being spewed in the name of not being PC. The idea that marginalized or historically oppressed groups should be given any kind of consideration is met with eye-rolling and open disdain. In the past year, I’ve been stunned to witness educated adults behaving like petulant children, gleefully claiming they’re taking down “the establishment” by throwing out the baby of human decency with the “politically correct” bathwater.

I agree with her that spewing hate in a misguided rebellion against political correctness is pretty ugly. And she’s probably right that there’s a rebellion going on in a PC reaction. That probably explains much of Donald Trump’s popularity. He does speak things that are not PC, and people who have had enough of that oppression cheer.

However, people are mistaken if they think he does it for the sake of free speech. If you watch how he reacts to people who speak out against him, or disagree with him, you’ll see the very tactics the PC police use: humiliation, coercion, and economic and social pressure. He’s not anti-PC; he’s pro-Trump’s version of what is allowed to be said. He’s into manipulating people by controlling their words as much as anyone else shutting us down for the sin of digressing from PC script.

For someone like me, careful about words, and naturally gentle and kind, yet "painfully honest" (yes, I've been called that), any version of political correctness is a danger; it mislabels me without exploring who I am in my heart.

I’ve lived long enough to watch PC vocabulary change. In my childhood, the N-word was never used; that would have been considered offensive well before I was born. But at that time, in the place where I lived, which had never allowed slavery and never had Jim Crow laws, the word for the race of people descended from various tribes in Africa and identifiable by darker skin and other characteristics was Negro, which comes from the Latin for black. It was just a term, not intended to be derogatory.

Then the term colored became more common (as used by the NAACP). Then we were told that was derogatory and we should use the term Afro-American. Then we were told the preferred term was black. Every time we accommodated, the term was changed and we were accused of being offensive.

Not that long ago we were told that black was derogatory and we should use the term African-American.

As a word person, that term doesn’t make sense; it applies not to race but to place of origin. A Saturday Night Live skit once played on this, because the very blond Charlize Theron is from South Africa, so she is literally African-American. There are major portions of Africa today populated by Arab-type peoples, or Europeans who moved to Africa many centuries ago. Meanwhile, there are people of the black race all over the world who are not American, so you have to know enough about country of origin to refer to their race in any way, even when country-of-origin isn’t salient information. Imagine the awkwardness of talking about the racial aspects of Tay-Saks disease, which affects African-Americans of a certain skin color, and African-French of a certain skin color, and African-Britons of a certain skin color, and Egyptians of a non-Arab lineage, and Angolans of a certain skin color….

It appears to me that there are people seeking to feel offended, and no matter how many times we go along with their requests for yet another politically correct name change, they will come up with something new so they can claim we are offending them.

So, for my personal language style guide, I have settled on black—without meaning any offense. And that seems to be returning as the preferred term, if you can trust such groups as Black Lives Matter or the New Black Panthers.

Would it be nice if we didn’t have to refer to race at all? Yes. But since members of tribes insist on asserting their tribal pride and power, it comes up. And any idea can only be expressed if there are words to use.

Meanwhile, PC continues to be a bludgeon used against people with views differing from a particular “progressive” ideology.

I recently read a piece called “Thought Reform in America,” by Thomas Lifson, comparing America’s political correctness with oppressive regimes of the past:

Political correctness has attained a level of institutional power today in the United States that it can justifiably be compared with the totalitarian brainwashing efforts seen in Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (also known as "fundamental transformation"). The salient social mechanisms shared by the two efforts at thought reform are public shame and self-criticism.

He offers this anecdote:

Decades ago, when China first opened up, I met a prominent Chinese scientist finally able to travel to the USA, who had been denounced, tortured, and imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for his crimes of having a PhD from an American university and being dedicated to scientific truth instead of political doctrine.  I will never forget the broken man talking about he had been made to confess his crimes in front of a howling mob.

I thought about this sort of pressure when Governor Mike Pence was chosen as the running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. He’s generally a decent person, and has served his state relatively well. But remember when Indiana came under attack for passing a RFRA law to protect religious freedom in the wake of the Supreme Court’s overreaching same-sex marriage ruling. The PC police—in the form of media and loud voices combined with threats, claimed the state should be shamed and shunned and boycotted.

This episode included a newsperson seeking out a Christian family-owned pizza shop and asking them the hypothetical question of whether they were willing to cater a same-sex wedding. The honest owners—who pretty much never catered weddings anyway, as a pizza shop—answered no, and were shut down by the PC enforcers.

In that atmosphere, revealing why religious people needed the protective law, Governor Pence caved to the pressure, and basically apologized for the state’s mistake.

Sometimes it helps to reveal absurdity using absurdity. Blogger Matt Walsh did that this week, talking about the silly, over-the-top PC position that gender doesn’t exist. The satirical piece is entitled “Dear Transphobic Ultrasound Technician, How Dare You Assign A Gender To Our Baby!” As he explains to the politically incorrect technician:

You’re obviously a simpleton, so let me break this down a little further. You cannot tell anything about a person based on their physical and biological makeup. Anatomy doesn’t matter. DNA doesn’t matter. Bone structure doesn’t matter. The reproductive system doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. You can’t tell what a person is just based on what that person is. You can’t even tell if it’s a person just because it’s a person. You can’t tell anything about anyone based on anything.

If we are to win out against the oppression of our ideas, we need to do it clearly, and boldly. Without rancor. Being kind and polite in general, so that the claim that we are uncivilized for disagreeing makes no sense.

It is not particularly brave for me to express these things, here, in safe obscurity, where so far I face little effort to shut me down. But at least I speak. So, with no intention of hurting the feelings of various groups, here are a few things that I believe are true but could be subject to the suppression called political correctness:

·         The most common occurrence of racism in America today is black racism against whites and other non-blacks.

·         The systemic reason for blacks suffering poverty, crime, and other social negatives is the breakdown of the family—with 70%+ children born out of wedlock, and fathers missing from homes.

·         The Democrat party is and has always been about limiting the rights and opportunities of blacks—but they’re willing to oppress others as well.

·         Almost all the terrorists in today’s world are radical Islamists. Islam has a problem: either they must find a way to oust radicals from their religion so we can all identify them and thwart them—or they must leave that religion as unrecoverable, so that we can identify and thwart the terrorists. The very idea of imposing radical Islam on the world is incompatible with civilization and will bring only tyranny, poverty, and savagery. We need a way to identify and stop anyone trying to impose tyranny on us.

·         Marriage is between a man and a woman, permanently covenanting to form a family in which children can be raised by their father and mother. No other sexual relationship has the benefits to society that marriage does. Pretending other relationships are equivalent to marriage harms marriage and degrades the family, leading to the decay of civilization into savagery.

·         Sex outside of marriage is always wrong—and harmful both to the individuals and to civilization.

·         Abortion is a choice against life. It is generally a selfish choice made to get rid of the natural consequences of the choice to have sex outside of a married partnership.

·         Socialism is a form of tyranny; it takes by force from people who create wealth and redistribute their property to those who have not created wealth. It discourages work and innovation and leads to poverty. Best outcomes happen when a free market is combined with voluntary charitable giving.

·         The American Constitution is a model for limited government to protect our rights, and if followed by a self-governing people, it leads to almost unimaginable freedom, prosperity, and civilization. It will lead to these positive outcomes wherever in the world its concepts are adhered to.

The way to freedom, prosperity,and civilization are known. We need the freedom to speak up and teach those ways.

Refusing Service

I’ve mentioned here a couple of times that all our kids (plus a daughter-in-law) spent their teenage years and beyond working at Chick-fil-A restaurants. They worked for the owner of two of the top five Chick-fil-As. They worked hard, and fast. But were expected always to be courteous, respectful, and service oriented. During rush hours, that could be challenging, but that was just the way those places were run.

When daughter Social Sphere worked there, they had a regular customer whom workers, in privacy, referred to as the Dragon Lady. She was kind of scary—long fingernails that looked like talons. Very short masculine haircut. Sometimes dressed in business suits. Always intimidating.

Not the Dragon Lady's real hand,
just for illustration, found here.

She always had the same special order:

• Chicken strip salad
• No tomatoes
• Extra cheese
• Two packets of sunflower seeds
• Two dressings: one Italian, one ranch
• Put the fork in the bag, so she didn't have to get her own
• Tortilla strips
• And don’t you dare put in croutons!

She would spiel off the list very fast. If the worker asked for anything to be repeated, she refused. “You should have gotten it the first time.” Plus condescending roll of the eyes. Then she’d say, “And I’m in a hurry, so you’ve got three minutes.”

 

The way a fast food place works is, standard salads are made an hour or two ahead of rush hour. A custom salad has to be made fresh, so it takes more time—while everything is moving at top speed behind the counter. So a normal person would expect their custom order to take a little extra time. But they’re done cheerfully—I know, because I always ask for custom salads. But it’s kind of presumptuous to ask—for free—a lot of extras. The extra sunflower seeds, the extra dressing, the tortilla strips, were all extras. But this order happened day after day, without any extra charge, and without argument.

If the order didn’t meet the Dragon Lady’s criteria, she didn’t just ask for it to be made right; she publicly berated the employee and told them how stupid and incompetent they were.

Workers braced for her. The experienced ones knew the order—and got it right! She wouldn’t go to that worker again. Social Sphere watched her purposely leave her line to go to a different worker, to avoid her because Social Sphere knew how to do it flawlessly. The Dragon Lady aimed for new, inexperienced workers. Apparently so she could have an excuse to loudly berate the worker and let everyone know how unhappy she was.

Who knows why it should be the highlight of someone’s day to buy lunch with a heaping helping of bitterness. But that was the Dragon Lady.

One day she did this routine, maybe more severely than usual, with a nervous newer worker. She yelled. She fumed. She put the worker through more than anyone should go through for just a couple dollars over minimum wage.

The owner was there. He stepped in. The confrontation went something like this: “You come here every day. We’ve given you good service. We’ve been nothing but respectful and kind. But you berate my people. You’re loud and abusive. This has been going on for more than a year, and we’re done. You’re no longer welcome in my store.”

In our household, we talked about how affirming it was for employees to have a boss who would stand up for them, to let them know they were worth protecting, even from a paying customer. What a good man!

So, I’m asking the question, did the owner have the right to refuse service to that woman?

Under what circumstances does a proprietor have the right to refuse service to a customer?

Because the courts (and the court of public opinion) have been saying lately that, if someone comes in to your place of business, asking for a product or service that you typically do, you must do it for them. Governor Pence of Indiana has gone out of his way to say that the recent legislation he signed—pretty much the same as the federal version and twenty or so other states—means people have religious protection, but not when it comes to refusing service to anyone.

RFRA (Religious Freedom Restoration Act) legislation was highly praised in the 1990s when Bill Clinton signed it. It has a long history or working relatively well. In that time, it has never been used to protect a person’s bigotry. (A good explanation and graphic about how RFRA works is available here.) But suddenly people, even in states that have RFRA laws, feel the need to vocally boycott Indiana because of its “anti-gay” legislation. Which means that the agitprop is working.

The Soup-Nazi, from Seinfeld

Here’s what I think: a businessperson should have the right to refuse service to anyone. Like the soup-nazi in Seinfeld.  By virtue of owning his own business, the proprietor gets to decide what legal exchanges of his services for money he is willing to make.

I’m not in favor of bigotry. And I understand there were times, particularly in the South, where places refused service to significant segments of the population because of their race. But it hasn’t been acceptable in civilized society in decades. (Technically, a civilized society treats all people according to their character.) If business owners are stupid enough to cut off entire segments of the population over something so insignificance as melanin content in the skin, they should suffer the loss of business from those people—and the loss of other customers who don’t want to support a business owner who won’t et their friends come with them.

Without any government intervention, at least in today’s world, business owners should make their own decisions about what they’ll do and whom they’ll serve.

But government has interfered. Instead of everyone being treated equally before the law and society, some people are granted “protected class” status.

Did I mention that the Dragon Lady was black? That detail wasn’t relevant to how she was served and why she was refused future service. Her behavior was the defining factor. But what if she had decided to sue, claiming she was refused service because she was black?

Then it becomes an expensive and painful process for the restaurant owner. Even though he would probably have prevailed, because she had been served, as are all races in that store in our very demographically mixed part of the country, and there were many witnesses to her behavior. But the owner would be in danger simply because the Dragon Lady belongs to a special protected class.

Making protected classes in the first place was probably a mistake. Philosophically, it’s against the equal protection provided by the Constitution. But it was a more particular mistake to make people with same-sex attraction a protected class. Their differences are not inherent. They are not genetic. They are not readily visible. They are differences in behavior. And people can have reasonable differences of opinion about what behaviors are acceptable—with some few areas of general agreement, like “thou shalt not murder” and “thou shalt not steal.”

In many religions, including mine, sex outside of marriage is always a sin. And marriage is as it has been since Adam and Eve, between a man and a woman, a connection intended for eternity. While people with same-sex attraction are God’s children as well, they have the same expectations: complete abstinence outside of marriage, and complete fidelity within marriage (to a marriageable person of the opposite sex).  We believe this is the best arrangement for bringing children into the world and raising them in righteousness. We believe God encourages families for our success and happiness. And social science bears out that truth: family of a married mother and father who raise their children are the basic unit of civilization.

That doesn’t mean we demean or avoid anyone who believes differently, or behaves differently. But it should mean that we cannot be forced to engage in activities that we, in our hearts, perceive as celebrating and supporting a sin.

No one should be expected to give up their right to freely choose what they will do simply because they enter into business to make a living. Nor should there be a lot of debate about whether the thing being asked is too much of an imposition. For instance, is baking a cake designed to celebrate homosexuality really an imposition? But taking photography at the ceremony--that would be participating. Our perception shouldn’t matter; the businessperson’s perception is what should matter.

There’s a growing list of impositions on peoples’ religious freedom (pretty good list here, starting a couple of pages in). And there’s particular prejudice against Christians, with laws being enforced arbitrarily and intrusively. Overly zealous news/agitpropists have even sought out people with religious beliefs so they could target them and put them out of business just for having beliefs, not even for having refused any service to anyone.

Muslim bakers in Dearborn, Michigan, are not required to bake cakes for same-sex “weddings.” (Steve Crowder illustrates this, with humor, here.) Non-Christian bakers aren’t required to bake cakes that express beliefs against their beliefs—a court just ruled in Colorado. I’m assuming this case was done as a test, not because someone actually had an event where those messages would be essential. But it’s clear the court judges the messages being requested: some are protected, along with their protected classes, and some messages are unpopular and therefor unprotected by the courts.

What happens when a person planning a same-sex “wedding” gets respectfully denied? They take a few extra minutes to go elsewhere and get what they want. What happens when a business owner is required to use their arts and skills to celebrate an event that goes against their religious beliefs? They go out of business rather than offend God.

That is not justice.