I think it's fair to say that as the term is ordinarily used by leftists, I'm very far from being "politically correct." (Most people who know me -- especially liberals -- considered me to be a rather extreme and irreverent specimen of politically incorrectness.)

But I am starting to see clear evidence that even these terms are losing their meaning.

Bear in mind that the term "politically correct" once referred to left wing party line thinking, and more recently as a backlash against it.

Here's a brief history of the term:

Use of the term became popular in the early 1990s as part of a conservative challenge to curriculum and teaching methods on college campuses in the United States (D'Souza 1991; Berman 1992; Schultz 1993; Messer Davidow 1993, 1994; Scatamburlo 1998.) The word was taken from Marxist-Leninist vocabulary following the Russian revolution, when it was used to describe the Party Line.

The term was transformed and used jokingly within the left by the early 1980s, possibly earlier, to describe either an over-commitment to various left-wing political causes, especially within Marxism or the feminist movement; or a tendency by some of those dedicated to these causes to be more concerned with rhetoric and vocabulary than with substance. So on the left the term was primaraily used to mockingly dismiss their own more doctrinaire and zealous allies.

In the 1990s conservatives picked up and once again transformed the term "Political Correctness" to claim that a left-wing movement based in liberal academic circles was attempting to create a new doctrinaire political orthodoxy by using a form of social engineering that included changing words and phrases some groups claimed were offensive.

Why, quite independently of Intelligent Design, fewer informed people than ever believe in evolution now

Evolution from the primordial soup: not a scientific truth but a highly questionable philosophical worldview, whose real premises have been carefully concealed

How boosters of the evolutionary theory systematically stifle debate on the premises of Intelligent Design, and shamelessly silence challenges to evolution

How evolutionists twist any outcome in nature as a "confirmation" of Darwin's theory

The famous (and non-believing) philosopher who admitted that "It's easier to believe in God" than in evolution

The materialist superstition: how, having (they think) disposed of God, some scientists are eager to fill the void themselves

Charles Darwin: not merely a detached agnostic (his public pose) but a determined antagonist of Christianity

If the Neo-Darwinian claim is true and all creatures great and small are here on earth as a result of a long chain of improbable accidents, then we have little reason to believe that God exists or that life has any meaning whatever.

Our reasons for believing in God in the first place are derived from our own consciousness and being, from our powers of reason and our appreciation of the beauty, design and purpose that are so evidently built into the world around us. But if all of these things arose by blind chance, as so many scientists in the last hundred years have claimed that they did, what reason was there for believing in God in the first place? Very little, as far as I can see. If the blind interplay of forces (as it was sometimes called) could account for everything, what need was there for any heavenly or spiritual hypothesis?

If God does not exist - and most Darwinians believe that He does not - then anything that is mechanically possible becomes morally permissible.

None of this is to suggest that there aren't things like major gaps in the fossil record, and a number of particular instances where scientists got it wrong. Nor do I suggest that there isn't such a thing as politically correct science. But calling evolution itself politically correct would seem to torture the whole idea of political correctness.

You want genuine politically correct science? Try Stalinist genetics!

At the risk of sounding like a flaming liberal, there's something about a claim which places H.L. Mencken into the politically correct camp which doesn't pass my smell test -- any more than it would to label William Jennings Bryan (or Savonarola, for that matter) "politically incorrect" .

And if Mencken is to be PC, what about Galileo? Is the Inquisition, then, "politically incorrect"?

Parenthetically, in the Intelligent Design debate, the irony has (according to liberal William Saletan) been compounded by the fact that the ID crowd had already committed the politically correct sin of conceding geologic time (presumably an evolutionary domino which will lead to the anti-evolutionists' undoing):

Essentially, ID proponents are gambling that they can concede evolutionist earth science without conceding evolutionist life science. But they can't. They already acknowledge microevolution—mutation and natural selection within a species. Once you accept conventional fossil dating and four billion years of life, the sequential kinship of species loses its implausibility. You can't fall back on the Bible; you've already admitted it can't always be taken literally. All you're left with is an assortment of gaps in evolutionary theory—how did DNA emerge, what happened between this and that fossil—and the vague default assumption that an "intelligence" might fill in those gaps. Calvert and Harris call this assumption a big tent. But guess what happens to a tent without poles.

Perversely, evolutionists refuse to facilitate this collapse. They prefer to dismiss ID proponents as dead-end Neanderthals. They complain, legitimately, that Calvert and Harris are trying to expand the definition of science beyond "natural explanations." But have you read the definition Calvert and Harris propose? It would define science as a continuous process of "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." Abstract creationism can't qualify for such scrutiny. Substantive creationism can't survive it. Or if it can, it should.

It's too bad liberals and scientists don't welcome this test. It's too bad they go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously. It's too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things. In the long view—the evolutionary view—good science consists of using evidence and experiment to find out whether what we thought was right is wrong. If they do that in Kansas, by whatever name, that's all that matters.

But the point here is not whether evolutionary theory is right, or how right it is in all its particulars. Any arguments which can be made against evolution should be made, because it's the nature of scientific theory to be tested. That is how knowledge itself, um, evolves.

What I don't like is seeing labels like "politically incorrect" being used to describe moralistic arguments being used where they don't belong. Whatever the flaws of conventional Darwinian theory, calling it "PC" makes about as much sense as saying it's wrong because it undermines "authority." (And that the need for latter justifies belief in God.)

Pretty soon, "politically correct" will have no meaning.

And that's a paradox. That's because it's already "politically correct" for words and expressions to have no meaning (which means it has no meaning to have no meaning).

Political incorrectness is thus politically correct.

Evolution is Creation!

God has evolved!