Political Incorrectness Run Amok
You know what really bugs me? When people smugly pat themselves on the back for being “politically incorrect” as if being an asshole somehow makes you more intellectually honest. The biggest offender is the “Politically Incorrect Guide” series that has given us the conservative spin on American history, women, Darwinsim, Islam, science, the South, and capitalism, all with the promise that these new guides are giving readers an antidote to the liberal bias found in well, everything apparently. According to Amazon, the next installment of this series will be out this November as “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Bible”. If you’re releasing a conservative book about the Bible, are you really being “politically incorrect”??
With the teachings of Jesus being used to justify pretty much every line item on the Republican party’s platform, it seems to me that the conservative interpretation of the Bible is the one that people have to tiptoe around. If you wanted to publish a guide to the Bible that’s truly “politically incorrect”, you should start by pointing out that Jesus said more about hypocrisy, wealth, and greed than abortion or homosexuality. Point out that contrary to the fundies who insist that the United States is a “Christian nation” and that the Ten Commandments are the “moral foundation of American law”, Jesus never repeated all ten of the commandments in the gospels. In fact, Jesus had just one commandment “That ye love one another, as I have loved you.”
So if you really want to be “politically incorrect”, you should stick it to the political conservatives who favor a tax code that rewards the rich, an inefficient medical system that leaves millions of people at risk, and a brand of “family values” that divides families and tries to keep people from loving each other. Any interpretation of the Bible they offer that would justify their greed, xenophobia, heartlessness is a self-indulgent perversion of the teachings of Jesus. To say otherwise would just reek of political correctness.
4 comments »
Copy link for RSS feed for comments on this post or for TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
“With the teachings of Jesus being used to justify pretty much every line item on the Republican party’s platform…”
Actually, I’ve always felt the opoosite: the teachings of Jesus — or anything New Testament — seems to be perversely missing from the GOP platform. The modern fundamentalist conservative Republican seems to be rooted in the Old Testament, showing (as you correctly say) the great lengths they used to AVOID Jesus.
Comment by K Ashford — May 9, 2007 @ 12:40 pm
The wholesale labeling of non-asshole style language as “politically correct” in modern American usage stems from people like Dinesh D’Souza in the first place. He and others labeled people standing up against language that demeaned minorities and the disenfranchised as “politically correct”. The backlash is essentially people who thought that they should be able to say whatever sexist, racist, homophobic crap they wanted to in public without any repercussion.
Comment by darrelplant — May 9, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
Amen brother! And well said
Comment by Becky — May 9, 2007 @ 5:03 pm
The Politically Incorrect Guides, or PIGs, are seen by their advocates as a response by the conservative masses of Red America to extreme liberalism in academia.
As a longtime student in Australia, which in the post-Stalinist realignment of the developed world has come to be the ally of Red America, I see the same thing here. It is clear that most of the youth in Australia’s outer suburbs have much the same socially conservative views found in PIGs.
What these people assert is that the social conservatism of traditional churhces is an absolute necessity to keep societies intact in the face of radical secularism and self-centredness that typify Europe, Blue America, Canada and New Zealand. They also argue that people must be dependent on themselves or on voluntary charity and that the high taxes of the nations mentioned above constitute theft. Australia and Red America similarly view public ownership as inherently inefficient and the social liberalism of the 1960s as causing low birth rates and exploding welfare budgets, and see the traditional interpretations of the Bible as very valuable for this purpose. (Many in Australia and Red America want welfare gone altogether and private charity care for the elderly and poor).
The Politically Incorrect Guides, then, can be seen as tools to achieve this worldview. As such, they are effective.
Comment by mianfeinàn — September 23, 2007 @ 2:13 am