Leftist hate speech

Leftists call all sorts  of things hate speech but that is projection. They are the real haters. Their constant finding fault with normality shows that clearly.  They are obsessive fault-finders

Nick Cater

Few things lift the human spirit like the triumph of the underdog. Which is why we must welcome the dispiriting news that the hitherto undistinguished personal pronoun “they” has been named word of the year by the Merriam-Webster dictionary.

We are told that the number of people looking up they has risen by 313 per cent this year, which is a surprising statistic since practically no one had thought of looking it up before.

Seven centuries after it entered the English language from the Norse, the personal pronoun’s plurality has transitioned to singular. It is deemed to be less hurtful than he or she by those who care more for political correctness than correct grammar.

If the inclusivity police get their way, kids in the future will encounter gender-normative personal pronouns only in Shakespeare, and then presumably only under supervision.

The use of they was made compulsory this year by the American Psychological Association when clients refer to themselves as they. The APA instructs members to scan their written work for bias just as they once checked for spelling. It offers a helpful style guide designating expressions as problematic or preferred.

Males and females are in the problematic column. An array of unproblematic alternatives is listed in the column marked preferred: “Cisgender men, cis men, cisgender women, cis women, cis people, cis allies, transgender men, trans men, transgender women, trans women, transgender people, trans people, gender-fluid people, gender-nonconforming people, gender-expansive people, gender-creative people, agender people, bi-gender people, genderqueer people”. If in doubt, the authors suggest, use the word humans.

With a resource such as this so easily to hand, it is disappointing that the scriptwriters of the popular BBC television comedy show Gavin and Stacey chose to use the word “faggot” in this year’s Christmas special.

In their defence, the six-letter F-word is in the lyrics of a song about an argument between drunk people by the Pogues, sung by members of the cast in the ironic tone in which it was first performed.

The offence seekers will have none of it. Last week Alex Dyke, a DJ at BBC Radio Solent and therefore a minor Southampton celebrity, said he was no longer comfortable playing the song. He took to Twitter to condemn it as “an offensive pile of down-market chav bilge”.

Apparently, “chav”, a derogatory term used by snobs to describe the ill-bred, is not problematic.

Rock stars once regarded offending people as an essential part of the job. Indeed, for a glorious period in the late 1970s after the arrival of the Sex Pistols, the imperative to scandalise ranked above the requirement to learn an instrument.

Today, however, any artist with a career that began more than 10 minutes ago is liable to fall victim to “cancel culture”, which happens to be the Macquarie Dictionary’s 2019 word of the year. To suggest that it is two words would be an unwarranted cultural presupposition. The rise of cancel culture explains why you won’t be hearing the Rolling Stones’ Brown Sugar or Under My Thumb on an FM radio station any time soon.

The cancel culture’s objection to “faggot” explains why Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing has been banned by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council.

Homophobic hate speech also would rule out Taylor Swift’s Picture to Burn and Katy Perry’s Ur So Gay.

Lou Reed’s borderline-transphobic Walk on the Wild Side wouldn’t get a look-in.

Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s anthem to racial equality, Ebony and Ivory, has been promoted from mildly irritating to highly problematic. The contemporary zeitgeist favours rappers such as Noname who refuses to dance on stage for white people. On the plus side, the avoidance of racial stereotypes and cultural appropriation means we may never again have to listen to Carl Douglas’s 1974 hit Kung Fu Fighting.

You can’t be too careful these days. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch has yet to recover after he referred to “coloured actors” in an American TV interview four years ago. What he should have said, of course, was “actors of colour”.

American commentator David Roberts must have thought he was on safe ground when he compared “refugees who have walked thousands of miles to escape oppression” with “sedentary, heart-diseased, fast-food gobbling, car-addicted suburbanites” who cast judgment on them.

Yet this unfortunate example of fat-shaming enraged the grievance-mongers on social media who laid into him for being “only half-woke”. Fat people, one presumes, should now be referred to as people of girth.

One hesitates to refer to religion in these judgmental times, even at Christmas.

Yet we cannot but reflect that cancel culture is yet another of the birth pains of a new religion, ugly and badly formed, conceived to take the place of the old religion from which many of us drew our moral compass as recently as five minutes ago.

Cancel culture was what once drove the Catholic Church to excommunicate heretics, pull out their fingernails and burn them at the stake. Cancel culture motivates the Exclusive Brethren to avoid contact with apostates, drawing authority from St Paul in his Letter to the Thessalonians “that ye withdraw yourselves from every brother that walketh disorderly, and not after the tradition which he received of us”.

The new religion, like the old one, requires us to wrestle with seeming contradictions. Why in the name of the they-hood of humankind are people so readily excluded in the cause of inclusivity? Why does their God, if they have one, appear to care more for the suffering of some minority groups than others?

How does their declared love of global humanity fit with their contempt for their neighbours?

In the end we are drawn back to the great insoluble, the hidden wisdom known only unto the faithful that leaves the rest of us stumped.

Who appointed this new priesthood and why do they spend so much time on Twitter?

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