Political Correctness - enough!

A nice little piece on political correctness by Beth Stephenson of the Edmonton Sun...

I’m tired of the political correctness police insulting members of society who don’t deserve it. On the surface, it seems founded in the desire to prevent insults, but in reality, it is the politics of fear.

A few years ago, I submitted a story to a children’s magazine about an obese toad that lived in a bayou of Louisiana. He made his living advising tadpoles and pollywogs and was so successful that he never had to catch his own food. My object in writing the story was to encourage our increasingly sedentary children to exercise. After all, statistics are huge that lifestyle choices are producing obese children. I never dreamed that the P.C. police would cite me on such a no-brainer theme, but a lengthy note from the editor put me straight.

It seems I cast all the dominant characters as male and all the subservient characters as female. This was an insult to womankind. But if I’d made the characters female, I’d be cited for body stereotyping against females. The real insult is that editors think we females are so thin-skinned we can’t read a children’s story about a male toad seeing a male (frog) doctor, without feeling oppressed.