> It's the same with gay. You are not supposed to use it as an insult.
When you say "not supposed to" I'm curious by whose authority are you claiming that? For sake of argument, let's say there are some people out there who view homosexuality as an undesirable or defective or merely an "icky" thing. For example, they may not feel a gay man is evil or making a lifestyle choice, necessarily, but they may find it disasteful or uncomfortable, and they may not think it's psychologically healthy for two gay men to raise a child. Yet the "gay is 100% OK" crowd tends to demonize a person if they don't think exactly the same as they do. But if they do feel it's a negative thing, or something they feel is gross, why can't they use it as an insult? Just as they would use the insult of fat, stupid, ignorant, etc. By whose authority are certain insults not "allowed"? Is there some holy document which declares precisely and completely objectively which words you can and cannot say, or which thoughts you can and cannot express? And not I'm not talking about legal documents, those are clearly made up by humans, and vary by culture, time, fashion, etc.
It's this kind of nuance which is at the heart of why so many people don't agree with so-called Political Correctness. It's seen as an almost facist or Big Brother kind of thing where one group of people make these pronouncements about what some other group of people are and are not allowed to say, or think. There are shades of grey involved, clearly, where some cases are "black", and some "white-ish" but a whole lot of gray. But people on the P.C. bandwagon -- which also seem to correlate highly to US college students, professors and academics, especially non-STEM -- get on this moral high horse about what sounds like a very narrow and very strict definition about what's Right and what's Wrong to say or think. Which itself, to me, seems ludicrous at best, and unethical and oppressive at worse. A kind of close-minded authoritarianism about supposedly being open-minded and free. (BOGGLE)
When you say "not supposed to" I'm curious by whose authority are you claiming that? For sake of argument, let's say there are some people out there who view homosexuality as an undesirable or defective or merely an "icky" thing. For example, they may not feel a gay man is evil or making a lifestyle choice, necessarily, but they may find it disasteful or uncomfortable, and they may not think it's psychologically healthy for two gay men to raise a child. Yet the "gay is 100% OK" crowd tends to demonize a person if they don't think exactly the same as they do. But if they do feel it's a negative thing, or something they feel is gross, why can't they use it as an insult? Just as they would use the insult of fat, stupid, ignorant, etc. By whose authority are certain insults not "allowed"? Is there some holy document which declares precisely and completely objectively which words you can and cannot say, or which thoughts you can and cannot express? And not I'm not talking about legal documents, those are clearly made up by humans, and vary by culture, time, fashion, etc.
It's this kind of nuance which is at the heart of why so many people don't agree with so-called Political Correctness. It's seen as an almost facist or Big Brother kind of thing where one group of people make these pronouncements about what some other group of people are and are not allowed to say, or think. There are shades of grey involved, clearly, where some cases are "black", and some "white-ish" but a whole lot of gray. But people on the P.C. bandwagon -- which also seem to correlate highly to US college students, professors and academics, especially non-STEM -- get on this moral high horse about what sounds like a very narrow and very strict definition about what's Right and what's Wrong to say or think. Which itself, to me, seems ludicrous at best, and unethical and oppressive at worse. A kind of close-minded authoritarianism about supposedly being open-minded and free. (BOGGLE)