Newspeak was actually rather well known in the US during my undergraduate days. I guess it’s fallen by the wayside. Pity, I always assumed it was the foundation for political correctness.

“double-plus speak” is a term we don’t have at all here. Sometimes these discussions remind me that I really speak American, not English.

If entitlement butters your muffin, fine with me. The main thing is that we work together as a queer community to end the discrimination against us.

PC is a pejorative term to describe what is perceived as an attempt to control discussion and thought on certain issues and to take them off the discussion table. It also connotes a nanny-state, micromanaging, obsession with the appearance of things while ignoring the importance.

Basically, political correctness is the attitude or behavior of placing form over function, observing rules of “non-offensiveness” without much attention to their purpose. And, yes, it does present itself in insistence on “the right term.”

However, the issue about who is allowed to speak and who is granted presumed authority due to attributes (ie. a old white heterosexual male is always wrong on every issue due to his privilege) is not PC. That is entitlement.

They are similar and related, but not quite the same or used in the same way or for the same purpose.

Political correctness is more schoolmarmish and prissy and intended to make everyone conform and be good. Entitlement creates a caste system and assigns worth based on things like race and gender.

So I do get confused at your usage of the term. I think perhaps that for a while it would be less confusing to avoid use of PC or politically correct so as to have your point not get lost in the word selection.

That’s interesting, I think exactly the opposite happened here in the States between gay men and lesbians, for the most part.

If your city is large enough to have an African-American or Black Pride, get out and network. No-one seems to mind that I’m not black or explain to me why two pride festivals are needed.

Go read some non-white gay blogs. They may have more experience dealing with church folk.

It never hurts to be proactive instead of reactive.

I do not, however, identify myself that way in my thoughts because, one I’m not an American and thus am free of your culture’s need to preface every act of individuality with some sort of label and, two, because I genuinely believe that freedom for us queers is more important than all the differences between and among us.

Does that make sense? I hope so.

I remember the furious, angry discussions in the late 1980s in Europe. Many lesbians wanted to cast themselves loose from the diseased gays. They pointed out that there were no known cases of Aids among lesbians. I’ll skip the tired litany, we all know how the story goes. Fortunately, the majority of women who were politically active felt it was more important to stand as a queer community than to dump us evil gay males. The split, of course, remains to this day but the willingness of those women to work within the queer community to achieve freedom was crucial to our success.

We need to have our full human status, our full civil rights restored in the US. Then we can all go our own ways.

Never mind the fact that I’m a black voter…and that overlap right there (and the failure to recognize it as such, and the same thing happens in black communities too…) is part of the problem.

First, it is important to note that English is neither my native tongue nor was I living in the US at the time political correctness first began. We don’t ‘do’ PC in Europe, outside of the UK.

I have the impression that you see PC as something normal and, if not as something positive, at least as the standard for communication.

The roots of PC are admirable. At least, the official roots. My firm conviction is that PC was used from the very beginning to stifle creativity and to punish anyone who dared to think outside of the officially permitted box.

Put simply, I do not see PC as a tool to free us of our prejudicial thoughts. I do not see PC as a means of freeing us of the evils of judgmental speech.
I see PC as a weapon used by people to avoid having a serious conversation at a minimum and as a means to destroy potential harmony and cooperation in general.

I won’t single any one person out here, but a typical objection to comments made here is based on the fact that the person making the comment is of the wrong sex. Of the wrong skin color. Of the wrong sexuality. Is cis-gendered, is a Christian. Or is not a Christian. Is an agnostic but not an atheist. Or refuses to redefine established words to fit the PC language of certain sub-groups of our queer world.

Look at this thread again, please. Several of us are arguing that there is no one single problem arising from being African-American. Nor is there a single ‘black church’, not really.

It is not that you are being too PC or too little PC. Perhaps I am blaming bad manners and a passionate dislike and resentment towards pink male cis-gendered people on PC.

Regardless, too much time and energy is wasted on this very useful site fighting over language. If you want another example, take a look at the nastiness about ‘atheist/agnostic’.
How dare I apply proper English when a sub-group of the queer community had determined that their definition was correct because it was their definition.

The problem remains: We need African-American voters to either leave us alone or to support us. Our approach as a queer community to dealing with them has, up until now, failed with broad groupings within the black community.

You asked me several weeks ago to better explain my feeling that this website got mired in politically correct tensions.

I’m confused. Do you think that we are too PC here? If so then what, exactly, is the PC position that we are taking to the exclusion of other positions being heard?

Or are we not PC enough? Are we not adequately uniform in our opinions which need to be put aside for the collective view of our goals?