Say What?

Don’t tell someone to “Man Up” at Duke University. It’s “offensive language” according to an official campaign on campus called “You Don’t Say.” There are black and white posters all around picturing three wimpy-looking young men cautioning against certain words or phrases. The first proclaims: “I don’t say ‘Man Up’ because the strongest people I know have cried in front of me, regardless of their age, gender or sex.” Masculinity isn’t politically correct on today’s campuses and it’s scary for 21st century progressives.

Another claims “I don’t say ‘Tranny’ because it’s insulting to transgender and genderqueer communities.” Wasn’t “queer” deemed offensive way back in the 20th century? Did the word get a progressive pardon I didn’t hear about? And I thought a “tranny” was a transmission in a truck or a car. Boy, am I out of touch. Hope it’s still okay to say “boy.”

Duke University shouldn’t be telling anyone what to say or not say, but it is anyway. The university lost all credibility when it hung its own lacrosse team out to dry based on the false charges of an unstable woman working as a stripper. They were obviously bogus, but because the accuser was a black female and the accused were “privileged” upper-middle-class white males, eighty-eight of Duke’s faculty signed a petition that presumed them guilty “regardless of the results of the police investigation,” as part of their introductory paragraph read.

No matter that the accuser was proven to have lied and is now in prison for murder. No matter that the district attorney was removed and disbarred for his conduct in the case. No matter that the university settled out of court for an undisclosed sum in a lawsuit by the falsely-accused players. None of the eight-eight progressive faculty members have apologized for what they did to those “privileged” white guys.

What difference does it make!

Other things we shouldn’t be saying include words like “bitch” and the slang word sometimes used to describe a cat or part of the female anatomy. Heck, my mother told me not to say those things fifty years ago. I’m okay with discouraging them on campus, but other words my mother hated are fine for progressives, especially that four-letter f-word. That’s ubiquitous as an adjective, noun, verb, or any other way you wish to say it. On other campuses are campaigns to eliminate the word “bossy” when describing any female. It’s just as bad as “bitch” in progressive nomenclature. My mother was okay with us saying “bossy” when describing my sister because she definitely was. You can’t say “illegal immigrant” either, even when describing someone who immigrated illegally. Many media outlets have banned it too, including the Associated Press.

Progressives believe that if they can control what words we use, they can control how we think. The “Gay and Lesbian Advocates And Defenders” or GLAAD, issued the 8th edition of its “Media Reference Guide” in 2010. They list as “Problematic” such phrases as “sex-change” or “pre-operative” or “post-operative.” They recommend “transition,” cautioning to “avoid over-emphasizing surgery when discussing transgender people.” Got that? And never say “bathroom bill” either because “it’s a term used by far-right extremists to oppose non-discrimination laws that protect transgender people. The term is geared to incite fear and panic at the thought of encountering transgender people in public restrooms. Use non-discrimination law/ordinance instead.”

So ladies: If you see a huge man who claims he’s a woman come into the ladies’ room, don’t even think about whether he’s had his you-know-what cut off or not. It’s offensive even to let that enter your mind.

GLAAD even calls the word “homosexual” offensive. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Associated Press evidently agree because they’ve banned the word in their style manuals. To say “homosexual relationship” is “extremely offensive” because such a phrase is “frequently used by anti-gay extremists to denigrate gay people.” Neither can you say “gay agenda” because there isn’t any gay agenda - in spite of the what their Media Reference Guide obviously embodies. It’s offensive to say so, just like it’s offensive to describe an illegal immigrant as an illegal immigrant. Got it?

“Disordered” is defamatory too says GLAAD. So when the Catholic Church teaches that homosexuality is both “intrinsically disordered” and “objectively disordered,” it’s on a collision course with GLAAD. The organization praises the Washington Post’s guidelines which caution against mentioning homosexuals in anything but a positive light, as in: “Describing a slaying, for instance, should suffice without referring to it as a homosexual slaying.” All these guidelines are voluntary, of course. If anyone might think about violating them, they should first think about what GLAAD did to Phil Robertson and Brendan Eich. If you don’t watch what you say, they’d be more than GLAAD to do it to you too.