Happy New Year, It's 1984, everyone! Actually, it's been 1984 for a couple of decades now, but I guess only a handful of us have noticed. For a lot of people, worrying about "Big Brother" means another new episode on CBS, but for those of us who trade in ideas, which can be more offensive than anything some bimbo in a bikini might say or do on T.V. to those in the land of PC, we are acutely aware that we are being listened to, if not watched. We laughed, at first, at the ridiculous social paranoia exhibited in the use of such expressions as, "hearing impaired," "weight-challenged," or "Native American." What was wrong with a little honesty? If you can't hear, you're deaf. If you weigh too much to be healthy, you're fat. If you ask the folks at AIM, the American Indian Movement, what they'd like to be called, they'll tell you; Shawnee, Quawpaw, Cherokee, Arapahoe, Ottawa, Delaware, and Miami are just a few names they like. We tried to show the absurdity of it all by referring to our scrambled eggs as "partial-birth abortions," or by calling the Clinton Administration "ethically challenged." People like George Carlin, Dennis Leary, Howard Stern, Don Rickles, and Don Imus have made careers out of being offensive, but now having a sense of humor can be dangerous, as Imus and others have found out. At worldnetdaily.com today, there is the story of Marc Howells, a former director of a company called Barclaycard, who was fired for telling an insensitive joke during a presentation on the firms' quarterly figures. The punchline? "The results were like Muslims - some were good, some were Shi'ite." That's an old one. Kids were telling that one when I was in High School during the first Gulf War. To me, it's not funny because it lacks imagination and borders on toilette humor. To Barclaycard, it's not funny because it might offend a Muslim and cause him to bomb a crowded coffee shop. Ok, maybe that sounded a little prejudiced. I'm sure there are a lot of Muslims out there who abhor coffee shops and resent the implication. The point is, why fire him? Did the firm lose money because of the bad joke? Did his lack of tact affect his ability to analyze Pie Charts? I've worked with jerks, too, but I never demanded they be fired for being jerks, unless they were incompetent jerks. "Lighten up," you might say to me. Good advice, you should take some. However, there is a more sinister PC monster that the crime of "hate speech" has given birth to, and its' name is "hate thought." Consider the implications of H.R. 1592, also known as the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. According to the law, a preacher who claims homosexuality is an abomination could be indicted. That's hate speech.
Moreover, if a person who hears that preacher goes out and commits a crime against a homosexual, the preacher might be considered an accessory. Why? Well, he may not have verbally encouraged violence, but he probably thought about it, besides, such speech could be construed as intimidation by any homosexuals listening. What now matters is the supposed intent of speech, which means thought. I can hear the lawyers in the court rooms now: "You may not have said witches and warlocks should be burned at the stake, but you were thinking it. Such dangerous thought, inferred from you calling Ms. Doe, quote, 'a sick witch," is what caused Mr. Doe to burn my client with a cigarette! I demand the maximum punishment according to the law!" Am I overreacting? Does this sound like hyperbole to you? Time will tell. One thing that I wonder is this...if Marc Howells had called some one a Jesus Freak instead of "insulting" Muslims, would he have lost his job? Well...you probably already know what I think. Let's just hope there's no law against it.
