And as we look at the greater community in which we function, the PC police seem to be everywhere telling us, for example, how to speak and act. We have to be fearful of what we say, write, and think. We are fearful of using a word denounced as offensive or insensitive. Maintenance cover instead of manhole cover. Strawman is now straw; chairman is now chairperson, assemblyman is assembly person. When will selectmen become selectpeople? No more using the words cowboy or cowgirl, landlady, or landlord. The phrase Founding Fathers has been removed from America's textbooks and, if used at all, is replaced with "framers." Illegal immigrants are now referred to as "undocumented immigrants." Easter vacation is now spring break and Christmas is winter break. You can't sing traditional Carols in our public schools any more. But the PC police are involved in more than just changing words. In New Jersey, even though there had been patients across the nation who may have been infected by their dentists with AIDS and then died, NJ health providers who are HIV-positive do not need to tell their patients that they are so infected. Almost as scary, The Boulder City, Colorado Town Council will soon be taking up the matter of allocating public funding for a "hate hotline," which would give residents an opportunity to report incidents in which Boulderites use tactless language. No "mensch" comments in Boulder.

Political correctness is alive and well in religion, too. As just one example, we find that some foster intellectual supression by ostracizing others who wish to preserve the sanctity of science by keeping so-called intelligent design out of the public classrom.

The beat goes on and on, but if it were just about politeness and good manners, no big deal. However, it's about a lot more and it's time we acknowledge that this insanity is changing our society from within and that we, the the citizens of this nation, are increasingly censoring ourselves and losing our freedom of speech out of fear of socially engineered repression. We also need to understand that those who enforce political correctness are enforcing nothing more than an illusion. A dogma, a creation, if you will, to keep people in check and and from running amuck. A creation that in turn generates its own bodies of work, entire fields of study, and even new uses of language to go with them. In this strange universe, the rules of engagement are so vague no one is quite sure how to challenge them and yet we labor to incorporate them into our lives. Unless we begin to push back, more people will lose their careers, children their privileges, citizens ostracized, all because the fashionable and appropriate behavior of the day is so oblique no one can possibly see what exactly they are to do. Very insidiously and subtlety, we seem to be creating for ourselves an intellectual handicap that limits free-thinking, irreverence, push back, being analytically independent and/or intellectually curious.