Many letters to the editor writers in this newspaper have complained about politically incorrect language, ideas or policies as if the phrase curtails their freedom to express themselves.
Political culture over time always had a bipolar personality — tolerant and intolerant, inclusive and exclusionary. Didn’t the Puritans in Colonial times in Boston hang signs proclaiming, “No Irish need apply,” and laws prohibited Chinese immigrants from becoming citizens?
Didn’t Benjamin Franklin express concern over foreign immigration in 1751? He feared the influx of German-speaking immigrants, who he said were not as white as the English. Franklin asked, “Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”
And didn’t The American Revolutionary leader Samuel Adams express the virulent anti-Catholic sentiment? In “The Rights of Colonists,” a proclamation that was adopted by the town of Boston on Nov. 20, 1772, Adams wrote “that there shall be liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God, to all Christians except Papists.”
Catholics, or “Papists,” could not be afforded religious tolerance, Adams said, because their allegiance to the pope meant that they “teach Doctrines subversive of the Civil Government under which they live.”
The best antidote to religious intolerance, then or now, can be found in the words of Thomas Jefferson. In his “Notes on Virginia” in 1785, Jefferson said that alternative religious beliefs are not “injurious to others” and should not be restricted by government. “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
At Philadelphia in 1787, Jefferson’s understanding of religious tolerance won out. Most important, according to Article VI of the Constitution, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
An examination of social history reveals that at one time or the other in our history ignorant people made sweeping generalizations like (1) all blacks are criminals, (2) all Italians are Mafia, and (3) all Japanese Americans during WWII are traitors. They used “guilt by association” to make those generalizations.
Politically incorrect language, ideas or policies are deemed to be incorrect because they may be illegal, morally reprehensible, or scientifically or sociologically inaccurate.
On Dec. 19, one conservative writer on this page wrote: “… LibProgs will go to absurd lengths to accommodate Muslim fanatics”. This was in the context of a series of letters to the editor on the issue of a billboard sign of a local church. The fact is that no letter to the editor on the controversy of the billboard supported Muslim fanatics.
While we are overwhelmed with the news of Muslim terrorists on a daily basis, the threats of right-wing, left-wing domestic terrorism and special-interest terrorism remain very real. Terrorist organizations in the United States had their beginnings with the foundation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1866.
White racist movements remain major contributors to terrorism, but the toll of terrorist activities has also included socialist, anarchist, and minority nationalist groups, as well as terrorism associated with the environment and animal rights.
— Khwaja A. Hasan
Wadsworth, Ill.
(Formerly of Terre Haute)
