(June 26, 2015 at 2:20 pm)Yeauxleaux Wrote: It's contextual in my opinion.
Sometimes there's real downright racism, misogyny or homophobia that has to be challenged. I don't consider calling Charleston "racially motivated terror" and having discussions about race in response politically correct, it needs to happen in this instance. But if you find everyone getting offended over the tiniest of things, it becomes a walking on eggshells society which is unpleasant. Life's too short to find oppression in everything, pick your battles. There's also nothing wrong with satire or dark humour in the right context.
I don't like seeing religion defended for the purpose of being politically correct. The fact is Christianity and Islam in particular are the cause of a great deal of oppression in the world. Of course it's not all Christians and all Muslims who are responsible, but you don't help the discussion by derailing it constantly reminding us that.
You bring up an interesting point in your comment: "But if you find everyone getting offended over the tiniest of things, it becomes a walking on eggshells society which is unpleasant." There are a couple of very different situations in which this might seem to occur. It may be (and this is what most people think of) that someone is being too easily offended. But another very real possibility is that someone keeps saying very offensive things. To give a trivial but easy to understand example, imagine someone who uses the word "nigger" as a synonym for "black," and has no clue that it is in any way offensive. That someone will likely find that every time he or she speaks of black people, people get offended. In reality, more often, though, this will occur when some bigot says bigoted things constantly, and imagines that others are being overly sensitive, when the truth is that the person is a bigot who constantly says bigoted things. You have probably noticed this in connection with religious bigots speaking about gay people. There are plenty of people with stupid, bigoted opinions, who say stupid bigoted things with great frequency. Many of them imagine that the problem is that other people are just being too easily offended. They don't understand why anyone should be offended in saying that gays are satanic and deserve to be burned to death, or that rape isn't a big deal (there is a thread here that comes to mind for this second example, where an idiot is defending God's commands in the Bible that it is fine to rape women who are captives in a war in which one has murdered her parents and brothers, as long as one marries one's victim).
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
