This article just about sums up Rex and this thread perfectly.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/ne...84d6993c90014cd1d91b2bb45#load-story-comments
ONE of the puzzling aspects of political correctness in Australia has been its durability, its capacity to bounce back and repeatedly defy the laws of commonsense in society. Many of us thought this repressive doctrine had been defeated in the late 1990s.
Leaders from both major parties, such as John Howard and Bob Carr, had declared a new era of free speech and it appeared to be working.
Political correctness had come and gone as an aberration, a mutant strain in our national life.
The notion that a bunch of self-appointed inner-city elites could dictate to the rest of the country how we should speak, think and feel had been consigned to the dustbin of history.
Or so it seemed. Now the evidence suggests the PC monster has returned, worse than ever. It has grabbed hold of our university system, where Australian history is being rewritten and the use of sarcasm outlawed.
At Sydney University, the Evangelical Union has been threatened with deregistration because of the so-called “discriminatory practice” of requiring its members to believe in Jesus. In government schools, classes previously devoted to the teaching of maths, science and English are being replaced by “respectful relationship” and “anti-bullying” programs.
The new curriculum is a Trojan horse for attempts at neo-Marxist social engineering.
The Safe Schools program, for instance, is 5 per cent anti-bullying and 95 per cent gender propaganda: encouraging students to believe the genetic reality of male and female has become obsolete; and that swapping genders is as easy as swapping underpants. Even preschool students are not immune from this nonsense.
Early Childhood Australia teaches toddlers about sex and cross-dressing — consistent with its belief that young children are “sexual beings”.
Its Start Early program includes tours of the opposite sex’s toilets as a way of “valuing difference” and “reducing family violence”. This is what Left-feminism has become: a wacko factory arguing that if three-year-old boys inspect the girls’ loo they will grow up to never hit anyone. Elsewhere there are daily reports of a domestic violence “epidemic” and “national emergency”, inferring we’ve become a nation of wife-bashers.
Yet official figures show an annual domestic assault rate against women of 1 per cent. In their critique of men and “patriarchy”, Left-feminists never let the facts get in the way of a good story. In the new PC era, a man only needs to look sideways at an attractive woman to be labelled a “misogynist” — as the West Indian cricketer Chris Gayle found out when he flirted with Mel McLaughlin during last season’s Big Bash. While normal people spend their downtime watching My Kitchen Rules or Married At First Sight, the elites sit around dreaming up negative labels with which to denigrate the everyday fun of suburban life.
Chat up a pretty girl: “Sexist”. Laugh at a joke involving race or gender: “Bigot”. Enjoy a good-natured pun to do with sexuality: “Homophobe”. Barrack against a footy player you don’t like: “Racist”.
Taking offence used to be a choice in life. Now it’s a mandatory source of outrage for every two-bit Leftie living northeast of Marrickville.
Government agencies are adding to the PC plague. In Tasmania, the state Anti-Discrimination Commissioner has found the Catholic Church has a case to answer for speaking out against gay marriage (an institution the church has never supported).
Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, has gone a step further: redefining the meaning of tolerance, such that citizens can now be judged to be racist “even in the absence of racial malice”. That is, one can mean no harm to another person, say with the use of innocuous terms such as Muzzie or Negro — but still be found guilty of what Soutphommasane calls “unlawful racial discrimination”.
What’s behind this resurgence of political correctness in our national life? I can identify two causes: money and ideology. In the digital age, traditional media companies such as Fairfax are under severe financial pressure. Their response has been to chase clickbait — hits on their websites from exaggerated headlines about PC outrage (which then attracts extra advertising revenue).
Ideologically, on foreign and economic policy, Left activists have run out of issues on which to campaign — turning instead to “widespread cultural change” as a way of achieving their goals. Neo-Marxism’s credibility on foreign policy collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
On economic issues, the triumph of modern capitalism (especially in Australia with its 25 years of unbroken economic growth) has rendered the Left impotent. Twenty years ago it was talking about central planning and protectionism, but now these ideas are laughable. Trying to engineer cultural change is all it has left, a strategy exercised through influence in universities, schools, government nanny-state agencies and media outlets.
This is the new Leftist Cultural Revolution, a political movement no less manipulative than Mao Zedong’s original version 50 years ago. When the elites talk about “the need for widespread cultural change”, what they are actually doing is trying to transform human nature — a dangerously authoritarian process.
They are trying to re-engineer society in their own image, such that:
● People no longer speak the truth about their beliefs or the things they see around them for fear of upsetting the feelings of “minority groups”.
● The natural urge for people to laugh at all forms of satire and absurdity is suppressed, in deference to the (overblown) sensitivities of race, gender and sexuality.
● School students are taught that it’s natural to have no gender differences in society, only gender choices.
● Men no longer flirt with women or even playfully touch another man for fear of being accused of violence and harassment.
● The meaning of intolerance is redefined to exclude malice — thereby sanitising our language and increasing the thought police powers of various “human rights” tribunals.
Resisting cultural re-education of this kind is the greatest, most important fight in modern Australia.
We need to resist the suffocating propaganda of political correctness.
Otherwise we will become a nation of Leftist clones, our lives refashioned to fit the neo-Marxist mould.
