{"id":84,"date":"2014-05-26T22:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-05-26T22:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/05\/the-ridiculousness-of-political-correctness.html"},"modified":"2014-08-22T16:02:30","modified_gmt":"2014-08-22T21:02:30","slug":"the-ridiculousness-of-political-correctness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/rebeccafrech\/2014\/05\/the-ridiculousness-of-political-correctness.html","title":{"rendered":"The Ridiculousness of Political Correctness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Over the past month I\u2019ve come to hate political correctness. This neutering of speech in the name of tolerance does nothing to help us at all. I wonder if it really helps anyone else either. The insistence on non-offensive terminology has complicated our efforts to find support groups and help.<\/p>\n

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Ella keeps asking for friends who can\u2019t walk either. She often gets left out when playing with her local friends, and they get impatient with a playmate whose disabilities limit what she can do\u2026so she asks me to find other kids on crutches or in wheelchairs. She wants to feel normal<\/i>\u00a0so why can\u2019t we hang out with kids like her?<\/div>\n
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And I began searching. The lack of a diagnosis has made it nearly impossible to find the groups I know are there. I googled search words like \u201cchildren\u201d \u201ccrippled\u201d \u201cdisabled\u201d \u201chandicapped\u201d \u201cunable to walk\u201d \u2013 anything I could think of for days in a row and found nothing. There were groups for those with muscular dystrophy and multiple schlerosis. I found children with cancer and some with spinal injuries, but no general groups of families with handicapped children.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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I know they\u2019re out there. This isn\u2019t somewhere in the sticks. This is Dallas for goodness\u2019 sake! They are here. It\u2019s statistically impossible that she\u2019s the only non-walking child in the entire metro area\u2026.and yet we couldn\u2019t find them.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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I\u2019ve talked to several families of children with other issues, and they all say the same thing \u2013 why can\u2019t we just call things what they are? Who does it serve to make it socially unacceptable to just speak plainly? The people who don\u2019t live with such things have become so uncomfortable with the idea of imperfection, that the words and phrases which best describe them have become forbidden in the interest of keeping other<\/i>\u00a0people happy.<\/div>\n
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I\u2019ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic and I keep coming back to it not helping us at all, it only helps those people who aren\u2019t <\/i>sick. We as a society are so uncomfortable with the very idea of disease, disability, and even the possibility of death that we hide from the words. We find comfort in taking the harsh words of reality because reality can be ugly, and we reject ugliness in all its forms.\u00a0<\/div>\n
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We act as though this \u201cprettying up\u201d of the English language is a sign of how far we have come as a people, and I suppose in a few instances it may be, but in most cases, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the way it is at all. I think it\u2019s a sign of our insecurity and fear as a people. As we\u2019ve moved further and further from God, we\u2019ve become ever more uncomfortable with the truth. We turn away Him, and the weight of reality becomes too heavy to carry, until the only place I can find playgroups of handicapped and crippled children is under ambiguous terms like \u201cadaptive athletics.\u201d Heaven forbid that we should call things what they are.<\/i><\/div>\n
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If God is the way and the TRUTH, it makes sense that an increasingly post-Christian society would become increasingly uneasy with calling things by their names. Our society has turned its face from Him, and we\u2019re seeing it plainly in the way we speak.<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the past month I\u2019ve come to hate political correctness. This neutering of speech in the name of tolerance does nothing to help us at all. I wonder if it really helps anyone else either. The insistence on non-offensive terminology has complicated our efforts to find support groups and help. Ella keeps asking for friends […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Ridiculousness of Political Correctness<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Over the past month I've come to hate political correctness. This neutering of speech in the name of tolerance does nothing to help us at all. 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