Let me start by saying I don’t agree with every statement made by ISU staff member Charles Braun in his letter published in last week’s Iowa State Daily attacking political correctness. But that’s OK. In a free society rational people can disagree and life goes on. With that said, I will say I agree with his overall point that political correctness has largely destroyed critical thinking skills, and nothing proves it better than the online statements posted in response to his letter.

With few exceptions, logical critique was replaced with people claiming they do not want to engage with his kinds of opinions or questions because they are “hurtful” “hate speech,” “discriminating” or even “deny basic human rights to an entire group of people.” Never mind that if this were actually the case a counter argument could be clearly made by citing the facts and people could thus enlighten Mr. Braun or any other individual they disagreed with. But instead they largely just wanted him to be ashamed for his audacity to “still think that way.” This is the problem with political correctness; it erodes our ability to think logically by replacing objective facts with subjective feelings.

To their credit, several of the responders did attempt to argue against his statements by addressing his points. The problem is most failed to even directly correlate their counter points to what they found offensive or wrong. They attacked Mr. Braun with hysterical arguments and emotional accusations that didn’t address what he was actually saying but instead attacked what they, purposefully or not, presumed him to be saying because he questioned the PC status quo. They assumed he is a bigot to be dismissed, and as result, their responses were at best ancillary to the point they were trying to counter.

Several responses criticized Braun’s statements on gender reassignment surgery by essentially saying if a consenting adult desires a sex change operation it’s no different than getting a tattoo or body piercing. Not for a moment does it occur to these people that getting a minor decorative modification like a tattoo or piercing isn’t remotely analogous to an irreversible, life-changing, major surgery that removes perfectly healthy tissue. That alone is troubling as these individuals are in college and basic comparison should be well within their debate skills.

On top of that, if they actually did their research, they’d find that gender is a sociological and psychological perception, whereas biological sex is objective scientific fact. They’d also find Johns Hopkins Medical School has come out and stated gender dysphoria, the technical term for people who think they’re trapped in the body of the opposite sex, should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery. But alas, Mr. Braun was simply insulted as a transphobic bigot.

Another hot topic was the issue of the free condom buckets in the residence halls as many posters took issue with Braun’s statements “treating our students like trained monkeys unable to control their passions” and “unfortunately, abstinence before marriage is not a politically correct view.” However, instead of dissecting his statements, most went off on tangents attacking abstinence only education and issues of sexual consent, neither of which Mr. Braun mentioned in his letter.

Several also took issue with Mr. Braun referring to the LGBTQ+ acronym as “alphabet soup” but other than denounce it as insensitive nothing of substance was really stated. In the last decade, the acronym has gone from Gay to Lesbian and Gay to LGB to LGBQ to LGBTQ to LGBTQ+. Admittedly, it may have been insensitive, but not bigoted or exclusionary to the community.

There were several other topics addressed, but you get the idea. The bottom line is there are too many ISU students who have been so ideologically conditioned by political correctness they consider a person whose opinion they disagree with to be literally “hurtful.” Not a challenge to be disproved, not opposition to be publically denounced as false by calmly and rationally responding with empirical evidence to the contrary, but hurtful. And those who do attempt to engage ideas they don’t like with actual counterpoints fail miserably, instead addressing phantom “bigotry” and “hate” they have been conditioned by the hyper-sensitivity of political correctness to see everywhere even if none exists.

The purpose of political correctness isn’t to keep conversations civil while allowing you to persuade, convince or inform with facts, but instead to socially humiliate those whom disagree. If you can shame your opposition because they’re afraid to publicly confront your accusations of sexism, racism, xenophobia, etc., then you never have to engage them in evidence-based discussion. When people are persuaded to remain silent when being told even the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced by policy, law or popular social pressure to conform to the lies, they have lost their integrity and have assimilated into what PC culture has deemed appropriate thinking even when factually incorrect.

The people’s ability to resist anything is then eroded, and now lies can become the “truth” not because they are in fact true or supported by un-manipulated data, but instead because it’s natural for people to want to be accepted among their peers as “enlightened,” “pro-equality,” “tolerant” or “on the right side of history” and so they must accept them as true irrespective of fact out of the fear of the social disgrace to publicly think otherwise. Wherever it may have started political correctness is now an ideological conditioning tool used to control how we think by making even the questioning of certain topics a reprehensible act. Who wants to be known as a bigot in a free society that champions equality?

Regardless of your personal politics, it’s time political correctness is stopped. If we care about higher education producing enlightened adults who can contribute to our free and open society, we can start right at Iowa State by putting evidence-based discourse above popular trends and argumentative hysterics.