Political Correctness Run Amuck

People are too easily offended by nothing - the prime issue with political correctness. The dumbest thing can mean the end of your career. Let's not take life so seriously. Let's go back to the days of common sense and do away with the sin of political correctness.

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March 15, 204

Those Evil Pioneers

A group of students and professors at the University of Nebraska says the school's new tagline, "Pioneering New Frontiers," should be reconsidered because it might offend American Indians, reports the Daily Nebraskan.

"There were people here before the pioneers," says Cynthia Willis-Esqueda, coordinator of Native American studies at UNL. "They have always been here and are still here. And the tagline doesn't include them."

The officials who chose the line say it is meant to represent innovation and forward steps, but John Wunder, UNL Academic Senate president and history professor, said he had received calls from several people who called it "exclusionary."

Life in LA

The Los Angeles Times has a rule that the phrase "pro-life" will not appear on its pages because it might offend the pro-abortion crowd, reports Reuters, something a witless opera reviewer found out the hard way.

A music critic for the paper wrote that a Richard Strauss opera was "pro-life," intending to mean that it was a celebration of life. But he had his story changed by a copy editor to read "anti-abortion."

"It's about children who aren't born yet screaming to be born — not abortion," said the critic, Mark Swed. "Somebody who didn't quite get it got a little bit too politically correct ... and we had a little breakdown in communications."

The ban apparently doesn't extend to the phrase "pro-choice."

For the Birds

City officials in a town in Northern Italy have passed animal rights legislation that essentially bans the boiling of live lobsters as "useless torture," reports the Daily Telegraph.

The new law, passed in the town of Reggio Emilia near Bologna, also requires "sociable" birds to be kept in pairs, regulates the size of bird cages, makes it illegal to keep a goldfish in a round glass bowl and requires owners to ensure that each pet sharing a meal gets an equal portion.

Some city residents were obviously caught off guard by legislation.

"I'd like someone on the council to explain how people are supposed to determine that a bird is 'sociable,'" said resident Davide Nitrosi. "Also, how am I supposed to kill a lobster before cooking it? Hit it on the head?"

December 3, 2003 - Fox News.com

Insensitive and Insulting

Lehman Brothers was being "insensitive and insulting" when one of its officials suggested -- following disclosures that it had ties to slavery when it was legal -- that "the Lehman Brothers in the 1850s is not the company that it is today," reports the  Chicago Sun-Times .

A Chicago alderman, Dorothy Tillman, wants Carole Brown, a senior vice president of Lehman Brothers, to resign her post as chairwoman of the Chicago Transit Authority. Tillman demanded that Brown apologize for allowing herself to be used to "sanitize the reputation of a company built on the backs of her own people," as the Sun-Times put it.

In an affidavit filed in connection with its role as co-senior manager of a $145 million O'Hare Airport bond issue, Lehman Brothers admitted that the three brothers who founded the firm's predecessor in Montgomery, Ala., in 1850 purchased a female slave named Martha four years later. Historical records also suggest that the brothers "may have personally owned other slaves," the company stated.

December 3, 2003 - Fox News.com

Legends Come to Life

We avoided it at first because it sounded too much like an urban legend, but a report that Los Angeles County has barred IT contractors from using the terms "Master/Slave" on their computer equipment in order to preserve cultural sensitivity appears to be true.

The estimable  Snopes  Web site tracked a memo from Los Angeles' Internal Services Department earlier this month telling contractors to "ensure that any equipment, supplies or services that are provided to County departments do not possess or portray an image that may be construed as offensive or defamatory in nature."

One such offense is apparently use of the computing term Master/Slave, which Snopes says is a "term commonly used in computing (and related industries) to describe the unidirectional control of one device or process by another."

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