Saturday, June 18, 2016

The Real Problem With Political Correctness


Political correctness is the attempt by the power in control to influence a culture's values to fit their agenda, often one that benefits their cause or helps them stay in power. Values are critical to any society because they determine our actions. Our culture, traditions and actions are all shaped by what we value.  Our values are based on what we believe. Beliefs, values and actions form a pyramid. Beliefs are the base, core values rest upon them and actions on top.  

What is disturbing is how far and fast our society is burning away the values that have been the foundation of western society, in particular the United States, the Judeo-Christian values which shaped our culture for the past 300 years. 

In the late 60's and 70's our values, the things that meant the most, faith, family, honesty, hard work, freedom and individual rights, the core of our ethics and ideals established from the Bible, began to be challenged. Now we have an all out assault and have exchanged a code of ethics based on moral absolutes for one that is based on situational ethics. As a result:
  • Faith has been deemed unnecessary and even unwanted in the public sector.  Faith in God has been replaced with a faith in the government and self. 
  • Marrige has been redefined from the union between a man and woman to any two persons. 
  • Honesty is an old value that has been replaced by doing or saying whatever needs to be said in order to please those in power or get what we want. 
  • Our value of hard work, a belief that every adult needed to earn his provision, has been chipped away until many believe the government is obligated to provide our needs. A good percentage of our population is willing to give up their freedom and give the government more control as long as they get some extra benefits in return. 
What is even more disturbing is that the new political correctness is not just replacing our long honored values but is actually blaming those values for our society's problems. In reality, as our values have moved away from Biblical to situational ethics, people have increasingly begun to act in manners detrimental to others and more destructive to society in general. Immorality has its consequences. It breeds bad behavior. So it's no wonder that those in authority and those who have influence (media) have begun to realize a need to correct this bad behavior.  Their solution is to establish a new code of conduct, one that deals with the symptom rather than the cause.

The new code of conduct against the "rape culture" on college campuses is an example. For hundreds of years our moral code set guidelines against sex outside of marriage. Along came the sexual revolution and our values were changed so that sex before marriage was condoned. Experts proclaimed it to be physically improbable for a young person to have the discipline to resist sex. So our schools taught that it was acceptable as long as one protected themselves. The consequences have been a huge increase in unwanted pregnancies, sexual diseases, and an increase in rape and abuse. Once again, immorality has its consequences. Is it any wonder that we have a problem with rape on college campuses?

So it's terribly frustrating to watch society try to fix the problem by dealing with the symptom instead of the cause.  Investigations, blame and shame on institutions and programs especially through social media has replaced simply teaching the values of purity, fidelity, respect and marriage.  Political correctness muzzles honesty, silences debate and diverts us away from the real root cause.  

Maybe it's time to put political correctness aside, deal with our problems once again at the root and re-establish the values from the Bible that have served society well for hundreds of years. 
“So then, where does that leave the wise? or the scholars? or the skillful debaters of this world? God has shown that this world's wisdom is foolishness!”
1 Corinthians 1:20 GNT
Here is a great video of another example of political correctness masking the true problem. 


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