<< The only way I can make sense of your comments is to read them as follows: a
woman who has an abortion, and who sees it as a moral choice, is psychotic."
>>
Hard to know where you got that. I was talking about David Irving, the Holocaust-denier and pro-Nazi historian. I think you have to be kind of crazy to know as much about the Nazis as Irving does and think that he thinks. As to women who have abortions and think that's a moral choice, I think they are quite right--and here I differ from you.
But I don't think you' and other antimoralists are crazy or psychotic or otherwise unbalanced, just mistaken. I also (I am sure you will be reassured to know) don't think you are evil, even if you presume to suppose that my daughter finds me uncool. (In fact she does, but she's 10 years old. All 10 year olds think their parents are uncool.)
Now Irving, he's evil. But his evil has a mad quality to it that makes it appropriate to call crazy or psychotic. It is possible to evil without this sort of craziness: MacNamara had that sort of relentlessly sane bureaucratic eviul. And it's possible to be crazy and even psychotic without having a trace of moral taint. Most mentally ill people are like this.
PC is not a powerful Force, contrary to what rightwingers think, and it's nothing compared to Real Correctness that makes left wing ideas unspeakable. As I know, I fear, far better than you, having been at the business end of it. But I was in the acdemy long enough to recognize that there is PC which isn't Miss Manners--and after that little rant ("frat boy," indeed), you are in no position to lecture me on manners. PC is a quite real, absurd, and obsessive practice language policing to make sure that, in the absence of real equity, at least the local idiom is inclusive and inoffensive to the local sensibility. It's possible that in English departments PC is so pervasive that people do just think of it as good manners, which means, I suppose, that it is good manners in English departments. But elsewhere, it's just considered a pain.
--jks