A Christmas Card
from Mary
Does Contraception Minimize the Incidence of Abortion?
Secularism, Culture of Death Hothouse
What Religious
Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
Politically Correct, Morally Depraved
What is the politically correct expression for a corpse? Metabolically deficient. What about a stupid person? Mentally unencumbered. We have fun lampooning the practice of the Politically Correct crowd to gloss over realities and to delegitimize perfectly good English words with inane euphemisms that in no way contribute to the solution of a problem. But Political Correctness (PC) is no laughing matter.
Where did the PC movement begin and how did it take root in the United States? The brief answer to the question is that PC is Marxism applied to sociology. We know quite a bit about economic Marxism. It manifested itself as Communism and we know the devastation it has caused in the world. Before it was totally discredited by the time of the destruction of the Berlin wall it took millions of casualties in Russia, China, and elsewhere.
There are many similarities between economic Marxism and social Marxism, which developed into the PC movement. Both are totalitarian ideologies. Economic Marxism ruthlessly exterminated any opponent to the Communist Party. The PC movement as practiced on many of our college campuses punishes opponents of some sainted "victims" group such as homosexuals, feminist women (not all women are feminists), quotas for blacks and Hispanics. It does this by threats, charges, and denial or termination of employment of professors with politically incorrect opinions.
Economic Marxism explained all history in terms of struggle for control of the means of production. In the system peasants and workers were a priori good whereas the bourgeoisie and capitalists were per se bad. In social Marxism, which has become the PC movement, all history is a struggle over which groups in society have power over other groups. All history and literature are concerned about power. Nothing else matters. In cultural Marxism certain groups are automatically good and sainted: feminist women, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals. They are victims and therefore good. In the system white males and their culture are by definition evil.
Economic Marxists expropriated the property of the evil bourgeoisie and owners. Cultural Marxism expropriates things that belong to "evil" groups. For example it gives college admission slots to "victim" groups at the expense of the "evil" groups frequently in spite of the superior qualifications of the latter.
Economic Marxism could always be counted on to give the answers its ruling elite wanted. Cultural Marxism uses "deconstruction" as a tool that always gives the desired answers. Deconstruction means taking any text and removing its meaning and substituting any other desired meaning. Thus for the PC crowd all of Shakespeare is about suppression of women and the Bible is all about reinforcing race and gender privileges of evil white males.
The parallels between economic Marxism and social Marxism are neither forced nor accidental. Marxist theory held that when the war broke out as it did in 1914 the working class would revolt and overthrow their governments. When this did not happen the Marxists did not doubt their theory (a true ideologue is never swayed by contradictory facts), so they tried to figure out why the theory did not work. Some Marxist thinkers decided that workers would not be able to see that their true class interests lay in Communism until they were freed from Western culture and particularly Christian religion. Reason and religion held out hope that one’s activity could achieve a better future and therefore blinded workers to their true interests. As long as there was hope that humans could solve problems in society they would never reach the state of hopelessness and alienation which Marxists thought were necessary prerequisites for social revolution. Marxists needed to find a way to get rid of Western culture.
A think tank called the Institute for Social Research (ISR) or the Frankfurt School was organized in the ‘30’s at Frankfurt University. Its purpose was to employ Marxism as a scientific methodology and apply it to Western culture. There was no intent to improve it or suggest an alternative, but to criticize it in order to bring it down. So when we hear from feminists that the whole society is organized to exploit women it is an echo of a criticism developed by the ISR.
One of the thrusts of the ISR was sexual liberation. The purpose was to counter the hostility of Western culture to personal gratification and to undermine the family, one of the bulwarks of Western culture. The hero of the ISR was the Marquis de Sade because of his protest "against asceticism in the name of a higher morality."
In 1933 the Nazis came to power and shut down the ISR. Some of its members fled to New York City and reestablished the think tank with help from Columbia University. The Marxist developers of what we call PC would probably have died in obscurity except for student resistance to the draft and the Vietnam War. The anti-war movement needed a theoretical basis and the U.S. members of the old ISR saw a chance to make the work of the Frankfurt School the theory of the New Left in the United States. Besides justifying student opposition to the war the ISR group fueled the sexual revolution of the ‘60’s. This was the origin of slogans such as "Do your own thing," "If it feels good, it is good," and "Make love, not war."
That is how PC came to our universities. Educators whose leftist philosophy had great affinity to Marxism readily adopted it. It took a long time for the leftists of our nation to appreciate the evil of Communism and even as Communists were slaughtering their opponents they referred to Communism as a "noble experiment."
Why should anyone be concerned about Political Correctness? Because in the universities where it has been adopted it has had chilling effects on education and free speech. Space does not allow itemization of the atrocities committed in its name. There has been burning of newspapers with politically incorrect opinions, banning of speakers who oppose the leftist PC view, the presentation on tax-supported stages of such obscenities as The Vagina Dialogues, a pornographic screed supporting lesbianism, and Corpus Christi, a play depicting Jesus as a homosexual. While Corpus Christi was acceptable a student who tried to stage a counter-production showing Jesus in a good light was "pushed to the floor, then handcuffed and taken to the Temple University Hospital psychiatric ward…and committed." Communist re-education? The goal of PC revolutionaries is the removal of any remnant of racism, sexism, class elitism, and even lookism, treating people differently because of their looks. There are also politically correct specific positions on ecology, foreign or domestic policy, homosexuality, and animal rights. If someone opposes race-based admissions he is a racist. If someone condemns homosexuality he is labeled homophobic or he is engaging in "hate speech." The objective of PC is not tolerance, but elimination of any position that does not come from the radical left. PC proponents seem to have an infallible affinity for depraved moral positions. Most Catholic students attend secular universities. At present they are in danger of being indoctrinated in positions that are hostile toward Christianity. One writer described some of our universities as ivy-covered North Koreas. As I said before PC is not funny. If you liked economic Marxism you are going to love social Marxism.
