Ignorance needs to be corrected, not indulged, and the political correctness mafia need to stop fabricating offenses.
Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith, who is black, was suspended for a week by ESPN for this comment: "Let's make sure we don't do anything to provoke wrong actions."
Smith simply recognized that women sometimes provoke domestic violence.
Who thinks that has never happened?
Smith did NOT say that domestic violence against women is ever justified.
ESPN apparently doesn't know the difference between provocation and justification.
Provocation: "an action or occurrence that causes someone to become angry or to begin to do something" (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/provocation).
Justification: " an acceptable reason for doing something : something that justifies an action" (www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/justification).
It's fair to say that Smith provoked ESPN to impose an unjustified suspension upon him.
This unfortunate incident calls to mind the case of David Howard, who used the word niggardly.
As The New York Times reported in 1999 (www.nytimes.com/1999/01/31/opinion/liberties-niggardly-city.html):
"Mayor Anthony Williams accepted the resignation of a top aide, David Howard, after Mr. Howard, who is white, used the word 'niggardly' in a meeting, offending a black staffer.
"'I will have to be niggardly with this fund because it's not going to be a lot of money,' Mr. Howard said.
"Mr. Howard's staffers apparently did not know that the word is a synonym for 'miserly' with no root connection to the similar sounding racial slur. A rumor snaked around that Mr. Howard had used the N-word, and when he offered to resign, the Mayor accepted, lamenting that his friend had used poor judgment."
Fifteen years ago a white man was the victim of a deadly combination of ignorance and political correctness.
Now a black man is the victim.
That's progressivism at work, and it's not a good thing.
Ignorance needs to be corrected, not indulged, and the political correctness mafia need to stop fabricating offenses and taking offense when none was intended.
Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.
Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.
The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.
Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.