I remember treating what was
sometimes called “political correctness” as a joke. I wonder now if the humour
element was part of the strategy. It made us think that the issue wasn’t
serious. We could be amused by the “looney left”, but all the time the Left
were using our laughs to get their Trojan horse inside the citadel.
The problem was that we didn’t
have a name for what they were doing, or else there were many names. The Left
itself denied the legitimacy of the term “political correctness” while at the
same time telling us what was correct to say and do.
The whole concept of one opinion
being correct while another was incorrect struck me at the time as dangerous.
It was so obviously totalitarian that it was hard to take seriously that anyone
in a democracy was suggesting it. But they were, only they were doing so
gradually. They were delighted that we didn’t take it seriously and that we
didn’t really have a word for what they were doing.
This too is all part of the
strategy. The target is vague and undefined. Conservatives have known for some
time what we are up against, but somehow it is illusive. It presents itself as
campaigning for social justice. It asks us to accept a tiny change in our use
of language for the sake of fairness, but thirty years later we end up living
in another world that isn’t fair at all. It tries to change the way we are able
to think by changing the meaning of the words that we use, and it sometimes
seems that we have forgotten the meaning of ordinary words. But it forgets that
some of us speak foreign languages and in these the words mean the same as they
always did.
In Russian there are two verbs
for getting married.
Women use the verb выходить
замуж [vykhodit’ zamuzh] It literally means leave to gain a
husband. The root "muz" means husband and is also part of the word
man мужчина [muzhchina]. So, when women marry, they leave home to
be with their husband/man. Russian much more than English reflects
linguistically what traditionally happened.
Men have a different verb when
they marry, жетиться на [zhenit’sia na].
This verb includes the root zhen which also appears in the words for wife жена
[zhena] and женщина [zhenshchina]. So, a man when he marries takes a
woman to be his wife.
The very words in Russian make
clear what marriage involves. It is linguistically impossible in Russian for a
man to marry a man or for a woman to marry a woman. To suggest that this were
possible would be to show a basic misunderstanding of the words involved.
Of course, this used to be the
case here with the English verb to marry. If I’d asked an English speaker one
hundred years ago if men could marry men, I would have been told that this was
simply impossible. The meaning of the words “marry” and “marriage” implied a wife
and a husband a man and a woman.
How did we arrive at a situation
whereby a contradiction on a par with an unmarried husband was arrived at? We
got there gradually.
For most of human history and in
most parts of the world there has been a taboo about homosexuality. Many of the
world’s major religions condemn men sleeping with men. They are usually
indifferent to what women do with women. There is probably a good reason for
this taboo. It is unlikely that it came about from nowhere. Pre modern societies
perhaps needed all the males to father children in order survive. But gradually
in the West as people were more and more willing to question the teachings of
the Church and as we took on board the ideas of people like Mill that we all
should be allowed to do what we please so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else,
the criminality of homosexuality was seen as unjust.
Homosexual acts were legalised in
the UK in 1967. No doubt the gay people who campaigned for this were delighted.
Non gay people in Britain could reflect that this change in the law didn’t
really affect them. It wasn’t really any of anyone’s business what people got
up to in their own bedrooms.
It’s worth reflecting that this
happened a little over fifty years ago. If I had asked anyone in 1967 whether
men could or should marry each other I would have been met with bafflement from
gay and straight alike. Gay people in 1967 didn’t want to marry each other,
they just wanted to be safe from being persecuted by the police.
But here we arrive at the crucial
point. Whatever step forward is made, whatever injustice is righted, it is
never enough.
The Left is unwilling to accept
that some people are genuinely different from other people. Each must be
treated as if they are the same no matter what absurdity results.
Through the decades that followed
from 1967, gay rights campaigners made gradual steps. They campaigned for the
age of consent to be the same for gay people and straight people. That seemed
reasonable. Eventually it was agreed. They campaigned for the same rights as
married couples and pointed out that with regard to things like inheritance and
tax there were disadvantages. Again, in time most people were willing to go
along with this. Why shouldn’t gay couples have the same rights as married
couples? It didn’t do the rest of us any harm.
But whenever a battle was won, it
turned out that it was not enough. Eventually gay people demanded marriage.
What this meant though was that not only would they be allowed to change the
meaning of the word “marriage” the rest of us would have to do so too. A
husband and wife would have to accept that they were in exactly the same
relationship as a husband and husband or a wife and a wife. We all would in
effect have to accept that 2 + 2 = 5 or that bachelors could be married.
This is the key to understanding
what the Left has been doing for the past forty or fifty years. It is trying to
make us change the way we think by trying to change the meaning of the words we
use.
Whatever steps it takes, however
reasonable, it always demands more even when it ceases to conform to logic.
Homosexuality ought to have
ceased to be an issue in 1967. Do what you please in private it has nothing to
do with me. But no. Demands have been made that the Church ceases to teach that
homosexuality is a sin. The teachings of the Church about marriage and the
purpose of sex have been condemned and demands have been made that they be
changed. It has been demanded that
people who disagree with what the Church has taught for nearly two thousand
years should be allowed to be priests and that these priests conduct public
weddings between people who even fifty years ago no one thought could marry.
This is no longer liberalism in
the sense of Mill. Do what you like so long as it harms no one else. The Left
makes gradual steps. Each may seem reasonable, but we end up in a new world
with new words and what appears to be a minority issue affects all of us. We
all have to change how we speak and how we think and if we fail to adapt, we
will be condemned.
