Political correctness has infiltrated our society through so many pores, that it normally goes unnoticed. But last week reminded us just how uncontrollable the PC disease has gotten.
The first diagnosis happened at Cedar Point, a popular amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. Each year in October, during “Halloweekends,” it transforms into a Halloween-themed park. Some of the main attractions this year include “Dr. Mented’s Asylum for the Criminally Insane” and a show called “The Edge of Madness: Still Crazy.”
It makes sense that these settings could produce a scare. But, naturally, the exhibits didn’t appeal to everyone, particularly the busybodies at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an advocacy group for mental health.
The group wrote a letter to Cedar Point requesting that the park remove the attractions immediately.
“Both of these displays suggest that people with mental illness are dangerous and deranged and that the general public should be frightened of such people,” it read.
That leads to the most basic lesson of political correctness: Everything you do is offensive. It doesn’t matter that an insane asylum sounds like a great setting for a haunted house. It doesn’t matter that Cedar Point’s job is to make money and scare customers, and not to enhance understanding about mental illness. What matters is that one group found the attractions offensive. To Cedar Point’s credit,
it did not cower under the pressure and has decided to keep the attractions.
The second lesson in understanding political correctness is that life should be humorless. That might sound extreme, but it’s true. Wiley Miller’s “Non Sequiter” comic strip was not featured in the Oct. 3 Washington Post. He drew a comic full of people and animals, similar to “Where’s Waldo?” His caption was, “Picture book title voted least likely to ever find a publisher … ‘Where’s Muhammad?'”
A few deep breaths might calm people into realizing that Miller was poking fun at spineless publishers. But the editors at The Washington Post saw the word “Muhammad” and decided to pull the comic. One is left to speculate what would have been done had the comic been making fun of another religion.
The final, and most ridiculous, example takes place in Ohio’s ninth congressional district, located in the northern central part of the state. Republican candidate Rich Iott used to perform in military reenactments where he dressed up as a World War II Nazi.
I am not exactly sure why he did that, but it might be because the Nazis were involved in World War II. Ohio Democratic Party Chairman Chris Redfern was not so understanding.
“Rich Iott has not issued an appropriate apology nor has he shown any type of remorse for what he did,” Redfern said. “He owes our vets, Jewish Americans and many others an apology for his practices.”
The last PC rule: Always apologize, even if you have done nothing wrong.
So what has political correctness taught us? Haunted houses are fine, as long as they don’t scare anybody. Laughing at funny comic strips is insensitive. And some politicians think it’s better to think like a Nazi than to dress like one.
