I think it’s usually important to say something (something better than I did here) in situations like this because they’re often what the Left calls “teachable moments.” Many of the most mindless invocations of political correctness come not from hardcore leftist ideologues but from relatively apolitical “fellow travelers” and “useful idiots” who have no idea they’re saying anything political at all, or that there are any enlightened persons who don’t agree. I think that’s one reason this kind of unthinking orthodoxy is so common in the “health community,” and it often goes hand-in-hand with a Church-Lady-like sense of duty to spread this unquestioned wisdom to the unenlightened.
To take a simpler example outside the area of health, if I say to someone like Elizabeth Warren that the oft-cited statistic that women earn only 77 percent of what men do is bogus and discredited she at least knows that we’re having a political argument. She may even be sophisticated enough to know that the statistic is in fact spurious, so change the subject to some other claimed evidence of women’s oppression. But if I say the same thing, as I have, to non-political students at some of the country’s top schools, I get a look like I said the earth was flat. Because I spoke up, though, some of them at least now know that it’s a subject of debate. And even if Warren does know this, too, she’s not going to tell them.
Does this mean that, despite what I said at the beginning about navigating the minefield “between crankiness and surrender,” I actually always advocate the former? No, it’s probably best not to make a fuss at funerals. And, of course, if you can pull it off, it’s always better to come across like Ronald Reagan than Mark Levin. But in general I think the homeland security slogan is not a bad rule of thumb for tackling political correctness: If you see something, say something. Otherwise, no one else will.
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