It’s an interesting interpretation of a phenomenon that is often considered exasperating but not necessarily the most important battle to fight. Yes, political correctness anesthetizes the sense of the sacred — but can mere words possibly matter as much or more than unemployment, the high abortion rate, political scandals like Fast and Furious or Solyndra and the regulatory war on capitalism?

Mark Steyn essentially says yes — or, at the very least, that political correctness is part and parcel of the problems we face as a nation. The words we use reflect the attitudes we have, and those attitudes, in turn, are both the outgrowth and the molder of our reality. According to Steyn, objections to Christmas expressions indicate that the West, in some ways, exists in contradiction to itself. The Daily Caller reports:

Steyn went on to note that there is no crusade to generalize other religious holidays and that the West’s budding hatred of itself and its values was at the “heart” of the matter.

“There’s something very odd by the way, as I said about this stilted artificial avoidance of Christmas,” he said.

“We would[n’t] have, you know, a day off on December 25 if it wasn’t Christmas. But somehow it has to be a generalized holiday. Nobody does this with Ramadan, for example. I notice when you look at the big Ramadan festivities at the White House that every president conducts now — nobody bothers to pretend that is a kind of general celebration. Nobody says ‘happy holiday’ instead of Ramadan. And I think there’s something sort of slightly — it’s not a small thing in that sense. It gets to the heart of the most disturbing feature of Western world at twilight, which is this kind of institutional self-loathing that’s at the heart of it.”

Then, too, precision of language prevents the obfuscation of truth. December 25 is Christmas, whether it’s acknowledged as such or not. What does it profit any of us to pretend otherwise — whether we join in the celebration or not?