The Standard Times has been airing a lot of attacks on so-called “political correctness” lately – so many that it might momentarily be confused with Fox News.
There are certainly gradations in “PC” sensitivities, and without a doubt some are petty. But when someone launches a vicious attack on others, it is hardly “PC” to be offended or to even turn off the spigot of hate.
Today’s political cartoon shows Arts & Entertainment channel “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson with duct tape over his mouth, ostensibly the latest innocent victim of a repressive climate in which “no politically incorrect speech is allowed.”
Well, not exactly.
Robertson did not utter an essentially harmless remark, or one that people of a certain age might carelessly drop. Here’s what he – wouldn’t you know it, also a do-it-yourself preacher at Berean Bible Church in Pennsylvania – actually said about gays, mixing his own weird theology with his own weird politics:
“They received in themselves the due penalty for their perversions. They’re full of murder, envy, strife, hatred. They are insolent, arrogant, God-haters. They are heartless, they are faithless, they are senseless, they are ruthless. They invent ways of doing evil. That’s what you have 235 years, roughly, after your forefathers founded the country.”
And in an interview in next month’s GQ magazine, Robertson maintains that Blacks were happy, singing, and god-fearing in Jim Crow Louisiana – before the government messed it all up. The NAACP disagrees.
Rightly, A&E felt that many (possibly a majority?) of their viewers might be offended and they shut the bigot down. Making such remarks is something that Robertson should probably have done in his private Bubba World and not on national television. Didn’t his Mama tell him that’s what you get when you throw your own weird views on sex, religion and politics into an already tasteless reality show?
Further down the editorial page we have Bob Comeau whining about the harmlessness of Fox News telling the world that Santa is White. Comeau wants to sweep the Fox News anchor’s idiocy under the rug with “Skin color, in both cases, is totally irrelevant.”
But skin color is not irrelevant. Just ask Christopher Rougier, an “uppity” Black 9th grader who had the nerve to dress like Santa and was rebuked by a teacher at Cleveland High School in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. This was a child affected by the supposedly “harmless” transmogrification of Santa into an Aryan icon. Comeau would have us believe that Fox News anchor Meghan Kelly’s remarks about Santa were simply ill-conceived humor, but then she doubled down on her inanity by insisting that Jesus was White too.
Much of the Christmas Nativity story has to do with miracles. For my money, the greatest miracle is that White America clings to the notion that a guy from present-day Palestine and another from present-day Turkey look like rosy-cheeked Bavarians. To point this nonsense out is a war on Christmas – White Christmas.
I would agree with Jack Rosen, whose own anti-PC letter to the editor was published a week ago, that people secure in their own traditions should not have a problem with Christmas. But, then again, here in Massachusetts we live in an island of greater civility within a nation populated with many Robertsons and Kellys. These racists and homophobes think they can let any verbal sewage leak from their mouths without consequence. Then, when called to account, their hate speech turns out to be “just a joke” and those who find it offensive are simply “hypersensitive.”
Well, perhaps one day, when they let up a bit, we won’t be so sensitive.