It’s hardly original to suggest that the real detriment of our era of political correctness isn’t so much the specifics to which we’re asked to conform, but the habits of thought that the overly sensitive ear engenders. That’s actually a detriment with two parts.
First, it makes discussion a power play. Even in the long-gone millennium of my college years, it was already the case that a classroom discussion could be derailed by the wrong word used in a benign way, if the opposing side could affect to take it differently. Something like “the other guy” might provoke J’accuse! shouts about the “Other.”
When that is the case, winning an argument ultimately requires having enough power (in allies and in authority) to push your preferred word usages on the overall discussion. There’s no: “That’s horrible!” “Let me clarify.” “Oh. I disagree, but I see what you meant. Proceed.” Instead, the debate becomes: “That’s horrible!” “You’re too stupid to understand!” “You’re too dense to understand!” “Yeah, well I’ve got enough people to shout you down!”
Second, that dynamic creates incentives against subtlety of thought and challenging of assumptions. If you don’t choose a side clearly, effectively ceding all ground that requires context, no context will prevent bad-faith readings. From there, explanations are made to seem like backtracking, hit-and-run, slithering, or whatever undesirable characterization political opponents prefer to proclaim.
And then there came Twitter.
This afternoon, I happened upon the following tweet:

RT @jessicaahlquist: New York teacher makes her ESL students pray to Jesus in class. Yes, really. nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx…

— Bob Plain (@bobplain) October 15, 2012

In case anybody doesn’t know the handles, that’s Bob Plain, current editor of the progressive RIFuture and Jessica Ahlquist, who made a name for herself by signing on to the ACLU’s successful campaign to tear an historical non-denominational prayer banner from the public space of a Cranston high school. At the time, I wrote:

By what conceivable measure is it possible to see the first of the following as more authoritarian than the second?

• A local school committee, with the apparent backing of a majority of town residents, keeping in place a banner that has been with the school since the very beginning, even though it hails from a time when it was acceptable to urge prayer in public
• A national advocacy organization (and certain commenters from Pawtucket, Providence, Arizona, and other places that are not the town in question) trying to use the expense of legal action as a means of bullying the district into taking the banner down on the grounds that a handful of residents do or might object to it

So, with that as intellectual background — and knowing full well to whom I was speaking — I tweeted:

My goodness. Are the kids OK? RT @bobplain RT @jessicaahlquist NY teacher makes ESL students pray to Jesus. Yes,really nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx…

— Justin Katz (@JustinKatzRI) October 15, 2012

Bob, I’m pretty sure, understood my quip as it was intended, because the following exchange ensued:

@bobplain @jessicaahlquist As long as the teacher “confessed” (per article) & put on leave for insanity.

— Justin Katz (@JustinKatzRI) October 15, 2012

The article to which Ms. Ahlquist linked contributes to the context:

… Schindelheim, ordered students to “sit in a circle and sing and pray to God,” making the kids recite The Lord’s Prayer in their native Spanish.
She even whipped out her cell phone and put her priest on speakerphone, so he could listen to her class’s prayers, investigators said.
Schindelheim, who has worked in city schools since 1991, confessed when investigators questioned her about the incident.

She “confessed when questioned.” And then she went on medical leave. So, a teacher in a distant school had a very off day, acknowledged that she was wrong, and a note has been appended to her permanent record. More than a year later, in Rhode Island, where atheist activists seem like they may be planning a push for floodlights in classrooms so that window sashes never make an unintentional shadow cross upon the wall, I thought it worth the effort of a tweet to convey the notion that a little perspective was in order.
The effort of a tweet turned into several extended exchanges, as if I had suggested that the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” should be interpreted as a sweet and innocent love song.
Humor entered the battle, though, when Portsmouth progressive John McDaid (with long years of considering me an enemy, it seems) jumped in:

@jmcdaid @jasonpbecker It should be an issue for that school; you’re acting like it was institutional; it was a fluke and hardly criminal.

— Justin Katz (@JustinKatzRI) October 15, 2012

No doubt, I’ll find this to be the next front page story in the Sakonnet Times about my 140-character-or-less debates. From the commentary around town, you’d think that the educations of the 1,900 or so students in the Tiverton district hinge on a school committee candidate’s refusal to voice regional orthodoxy on Twitter, forget less exciting topics like stagnant results in math and science.
In terms of my campaign, I can only suggest that parents, taxpayers, and teachers clearly need not fear that I’ll operate in secret and without discussion. I put my cell phone number and personal email address on the cards that have been mailed and otherwise circulated. My Twitter account is easy to find.
In terms of my broader mission online, I can only say that I’m not going to conform with the rhetorical sterility that already dominates too much of public discussion. It has been very disconcerting to me to hear the First Amendment cited so often as an excuse for declaring certain statements and ideas as completely out of bounds. At least in polite, correct society.
I’d propose, instead, that we ought to take the full First Amendment as a reminder that, in the United States, we want people to express themselves, even if what they say is unpopular. That way we can strive to correct each other while we’re still just talking, and we can check whether we are the ones who need correcting.
If we truly see ourselves as an extended community, then we need some perspective, such that we don’t treat a one-time indiscretion on the part of a teacher as equivalent to a one-time school shooting. But I’m learning in Tiverton, in Rhode Island, and at the national level that a frightening number of people define community in an exclusionary way — meaning that those who disagree must be excluded.