I’ll reference Bill Whittle on this:

Forgive me, I know that offended some of you. But remember this: words are words. They are encapsulated ideas, and the only harm they can do us is the harm we ourselves allow them to do us.

How much better, how much stronger and healthier are we, when we dare anyone to use whatever terms they chose, and rather than sitting as powerless victims, rise in angry and righteous indignation to fight the human filth that use words like nigger, spick, gook, mick, kike, dago, and all the rest? How much more secure, how much more inoculated, are we when we can hear these words knowing that those who use them are discredited and terrified infants so out of ideas and argument that they must resort to such childish tactics to reassure themselves? What words can hurt us when we refuse to be hurt by words? What simple and powerful wisdom is bound up in Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names can never hurt me?

This, dear friends, is the foundation on which my belief that words only have so much power as we give them, stands. Unfortunately, a lot of people would like to bury certain words from language, and by evolution, thought, by preventing our children from understanding the encapsulated ideas behind words.

“I was concerned when the assistant principal called and told me my son had said a word so bad that he didn’t want to repeat it over the phone,” Huff said. “But that was nothing compared to the shock I felt when my little boy came home and told me that his teacher had told him his family is a dirty word.”

I’d like to call this process The Krueger Method, named after the way the residents of Elm Street (and the town, I suppose) defeated Freddy Krueger once: by banishing him out of the collective memory by pretending he doesn’t even exist. We are doing it in the name of racial sensitivity. We are doing it in the name of public health. We are doing it in the name of self-esteem and the unproven possbility of psychological trauma in our children. We are doing it so that everyone says the same thing even though they mean another. They are doing it to change the way we collectively think. And who are “they?” The ones who know how to run your life better than you can on your own.

Or is this case really an implemetation of The Krueger Method? I do need to stop and think for a moment. That quote I stole from Rosemary Esmay’s citation has given me pause. There really still are people who think that homosexuals are living in a constant state of sin. There really are those who think that their love would never amount to anything because it is deviant, against God, and immoral. There are those who think they can be cured, or even better, Kruegered into seeming nonexistence. Besides, all gays are free to sinlessly love someone of the opposite sex.

In this particular case the faculty and the principal are attaching evil to the word “gay.” It’s part Kreuger Method, but there’s more to it than that, which brings me to the dilemma of the night: How much of one person’s moral integrity are we willing to equate with bigotry and hate? Really now. And in doing so, how much bigoted do we, ourselves, become?