What political correctness is

First, let me say what political correctness is not. By "political correctness," I do not mean disagreement with me. Many people disagree with me. Some have even convinced me that I was wrong. However, they have done so through logic and facts, not political correctness.

Political correctness is at heart the belief that certain persons' emotions are an infallible oracle into Truth with a capital T. The identity of those persons is, of course, determined through their own or certain other persons' emotions. That belief leads to the following results:

• The view that disagreement with one's own opinions is a form of oppression, if not outright evil (but politically correct people still regard themselves as the guardians of diversity)



• The view that since one is the measure of all things, anyone who is at all different has thereby committed a moral outrage (but see the above comment about diversity)



• The view that one has not only an infallible insight into how other people should run their lives, but also the moral authority to impose it (but heaven forbid that those others should return the favor)



• An inability to explain why one believes what one believes, let alone why others should believe it, without resorting to "facts" that one has made up on the spot, willful ignorance of genuine facts, hand-waving away inconvenient evidence or logic, transparently fallacious reasoning, or just plain emotional outbursts. A favorite p.c. tactic is to play every race, sex, and class card in the race, sex, and class deck, even if the person doing so is a white male from an upper-middle-class background. Once, when I asked someone why I should be p.c., that person answered in effect that it would be p.i. not to do so. Uh, okay. Another time, I tried to explain to explain to an HIV activist why the Catholic Eucharist does not represent the archbishop. He took that attitude that he, not the Catholic church, defined what the Eucharist does and does not represent.

Then politically correct people wonder why they are so often compared to the religious right.