So the Brits are going to police “homophobic” jokes. There are so many things wrong with this it’s almost dizzying. Starting with:
In Britain, Canada and Europe, the state advances too easily from regulating behaviour to policing ideas to criminalizing language. It’s almost too cute an irony that one of the United Kingdom’s few remaining principled champions of free speech is the creator of Mr. Bean, a man who barely utters a word. The comedian Rowan Atkinson said he didn’t think he was at risk of prosecution for telling a gay joke “but I dread something almost as bad—a culture of censoriousness, a questioning, negative and leaden attitude that is encouraged by legislation of this nature.” Ah, but, as the computer wallahs say, that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then criminalizing words is a way of disarming potential opposition, of inculcating a reflexive self-censorship in the citizenry. And, after all, self-suppression is the most cost-effective of tyranny. Political correctness isn’t merely the blasphemy law of our time. It makes communication impossible. It renders a people literally illiterate: the conventions of language used by functioning societies throughout human history—irony, indirect quotation, period evocation, and, yes, even comic stereotype—are all suddenly suspect. What a strange fate to embrace.
Not just strange, but strangely self-destructive. It’s as though we lived in the Hopelessly Masochistic Era, where the most sanctimonious anti-fun bunch (hello, Dalton McGuinty) are kings.
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