Whom the gods would destroy ...

[Trey Brister]

Exclusive Commentary Whom the gods would destroy ...
Posted: November 15, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern

... they first make mad.

At least that's what my friend Euripides said in 400-something B.C. (I'm really old.)

But I have a new & improved twist on ol' Rip: "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make silly – without letting them know it."

Exhibit A for today is the vast legions of the wimpy, witless and wacky: the silly millions of docile conformists who bow the knee at the altar of Political Correctness (PC).

Except for the minor part of PC that overlaps with basic Judeo-Christian values, it is vigorously anti-Christian – and passionately, hilariously stupid.

Item: Caldervale Hospital in Halifax has introduced a ban on visitors to the baby ward. They say looking at newborn babies violates their right to privacy.

Item: The Odd Ball cabaret, a Los Angeles strip joint, was forced to close a shower stall on stage. Now, I'm not fond of strip joints, but well, the government's rationale was that the shower wouldn't be accessible to a stripper in a wheelchair. They nailed the owners for discriminating against handicapped women.

Item: A receptionist at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Australia was filling out the forms for a patient. When she came to the question of race, she asked the man not to say what his race was, but to point to it on the form. The hospital was afraid someone of another race would overhear "white" and be offended enough to sue.

Item: The Newspaper Publisher's Association in Oregon suggests that members should not accept house for sale ads that mention a "master bedroom." Too sexist. And "near churches" suggests religious bigotry.

Item: Earlier this year in the United Kingdom, a government think tank suggested the word "failure" be replaced with "deferred success" to avoid offending underachievers.

Item: U.S. News & World Report told of a demonstration at Williams College where students taped their mouths with duct tape and sat for hours in a display case to show that women are "silenced objects of display" in society. They also objected to "supposedly correct punctuation and supposedly correct capitalization" as methods of "trying to control women that lead directly to their subjugation." They added that capitalizing the first letter of a written sentence unfairly prioritizes that letter at the expense of the underprivileged letters that follow.

Item: Dartmouth recently added to America's cultural heritage with a course titled, "The Invention of Heterosexuality and How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic."

Final item: The Oxford University Press, no less, has PCed the Bible. Its version of the Lord's Prayer starts off, "Our Father-Mother in Heaven ..." And Psalm 63 has been cleaned up from "Thy right hand upholds me" to "Your strong hand upholds me." (As a lefty, I'm sooo relieved to see this ancient injustice corrected. Now I'll be able to sleep at night, knowing that all's right – er, correct, with the world.)

The most remarkable aspect of these idiocies is the total blindness of their perpetrators to how ludicrous they are. The perps' astonishing inability to see the humorous nature of their words and actions reminds me of the old riddle, "How many radical feminists does it take to change a light bulb?" Answer: "That's not funny."

The ultra-seriousness of PC disciples is your tip-off that you're not dealing with a fad, but a religious system. As I noted last week, PC is indeed a new world religion a-borning. This week, I'm adding the observation that being PC requires you to surrender your sense of humor along with your brain.

I'll save my final rant about the evil nature of political correctness for another week, but today I'll just briefly recall a report from the ever-reliable Rep. Frank Wolf, R.-Va., about an Interior Department "training" session. Wolf quoted the instructor as saying, "religion was fear-inducing and repressive and characterized religion as more far-fetched than the Flat Earth Society."

As you see, we are dealing here with terminally serious clowns who have lost touch with reality.