Political Correctness Is Not "Treating People With Respect"

   This is a common tactic among radicals--when challenged, back-peddle. Characterize your extremist, counter-intuitive position as nothing but some uncontroversial home truth or other... See? No one but a monster could possibly disagree with this...
   Political correctness is not and has never been the view that we should treat people with respect. If that's the view you mean to defend, then you are not a defender of PC. I was tempted to write "PC is not merely the view that one should treat people with respect..."  The suggestion being that PC dogma demands that we go far beyond that, inter alia treating people with kid gloves. But then I realized that one can plausibly argue that PC does not entail that we should treat people with respect at all. Rather, it infantilizes people, demanding that we treat them (well...everybody but evil straightwhitemales) like fragile little flowers that are incapable in living in a normal world of adult people who do not always bend over backwards to avoid every conceivable chance of bumping someone's fee-fees.
   So no. PC is not merely not merely the view that we should treat people with respect. It's not at all the view that we should treat people with respect. To treat people with respect is to treat them like reasonable adults. Nobody thinks you should be an asshole to people. But nobody needs the PC language cops to tell them that.