Incurring the wrath of the easily offended

My high school colors were green and white. At graduation the boys wore green robes and the girls wore white. No one considered the girls inferior because of the color of their robes.

Today, we live in different times. My alma mater, Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County, Md., is one of several schools to have decided that their commencement ceremony this year will feature single-color robes to respect transgender students and those who do not identify as either male or female. In the age of Caitlyn Jenner, any effort to classify the sexes is becoming increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible.

The Washington Post reports “student advocates” have been campaigning for this, claiming the use of one color for boys and another for girls does not allow for the full panoply of “gender identity” increasingly on display.

Facebook’s attempt to accommodate gender self-identifiers by publishing 58 “gender options” met with complaints that 58 options were not enough. Unwilling to cross the PC police, the social media site now allows you to decide what you wish to call yourself.

Something very strange, if not bordering on insidious, is happening to this country. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld tells a story about his 14-year-old daughter: “My wife says to her, ‘… in the next couple of years, I think maybe you’re going to want to hang around the city more on the weekends so you can see boys.’” Seinfeld says she responded to her mother, “That’s sexist.”

“They just want to use these words,” says Seinfeld: ‘That’s racist. That’s sexist. That’s prejudice.’ They don’t even know what they’re talking about.”

Entertainment Weekly writes, “Seinfeld avoids doing shows on college campuses. And while talking with ESPN’s Colin Cowherd … the comedian revealed why: College kids today are too politically correct.”

I’m no comedian, but I would imagine it’s nearly impossible to make jokes about anybody or anything these days without incurring the wrath of the easily offended.

Washington, D.C., radio talk show host Chris Plante spoke about this on his program recently. Callers told stories of what their children have experienced in Montgomery County public schools. One man said his eighth-grader was shocked to hear from a male classmate that he is now identifying as a female. His son didn’t know how to respond. The caller said he didn’t know what to do.

Plante, who is from a Catholic background, said, “Send him to Catholic school if you can afford it.” How can anyone not afford it when the secular authorities appear to be brainwashing the next generation into believing that any choice is valid and should be universally accepted, and that anything one might say in opposition to these new sensibilities is labeled sexist or racist?

Catholic, evangelical, and other private schools and homeschooling are the best educational options for families who adhere to traditional values. If there were an exodus from public schools by people who are sick of political correctness, not to mention the government school system’s inability to bring students up to the levels of other nations, perhaps the politicians and those responsible for these propaganda camps might wake up and offer parents school choice.

As long as parents willingly put their children in a school system that not only undermines their values, but in many cases openly opposes them, and then makes children who hold to a different worldview feel odd, even bigoted and behind the times, public schools will continue to do so.

This is what happens when standards are abandoned and truth becomes subjective.

My senior yearbook at Walter Johnson High School spoke of its goal to produce “well-rounded individuals” and “competent young adults.” Today, these schools—with some exceptions—are producing the opposite. Graduation robes of a single color will not reverse this trend.

Better get your children out now before it’s too late and you and the nation have lost them to an alien intellectual philosophy and a hostile moral power.

© 2015 Tribune Content Agency LLC.

Listen to Cal Thomas’ commentary on The World and Everything in It.