Claire Lehmann: belief

Transcript context

…Let me try another example on you. I was reading the New York Times. There was an article by David Bowden, talking about superhero movies and how they’ve revised past myths. This was just from about a week ago. He wrote a sentence: “They [the superheroes] rival Mormonism for chutzpah.” Is that an offensive sentence? Should we be bothered? Should have editors insisted that he take it out? Because you might say, “Well, all religions involve strong claims. To single out Mormonism is unusual. It’s treating it as somehow especially weird.” There might even be a slight objection to the juxtaposition of Mormonism with chutzpah, a word associated with Judaism in some ways, and Yiddish—almost like a slap in the face that maybe the person writing this is probably himself not a Mormon. Offensive or not? No, it’s not offensive. I can understand why a Mormon person might find it a little bit offensive, but what we have to remember with these new rules around identity and social justice culture is that they’re not evenly applied, and there’s an asymmetry. Whether or not you can be offended by something depends on what identity group you belong to, and being a Mormon would not qualify as being part of an identity group that is entitled to feel offended by slights. Jonathan Haidt has identified about seven victims’ groups who are entitled to feel offended and slighted over sort of microaggressions: women, blacks, Muslims, I think indigenous or native peoples, LGBT, and perhaps immigrants would be another one. If you don’t belong to one of those identity groups, these rules don’t apply. When did political correctness become a major issue, or become a major issue again? And why do you think it happened exactly then?…

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