TT: Afraid of the dark

The you-can’t-say-that brigade has been out in force lately, and I take on the forces of silence in today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column. Here’s an excerpt.
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In an age of political correctness run amok, defenders of free speech can never let their guard down. The past couple of weeks, however, have seen a string of particularly egregious incidents:
• In Alabama, Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Montgomery’s Auburn University, has edited a sanitized version of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the greatest of all American novels, in which the word “nigger” is replaced with “slave.”
• In Canada, “Money for Nothing,” a song by Dire Straits that was a hit single in 1985, has now been banned from the airwaves by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (CBSC) because Mark Knopfler’s lyrics make ironic use of the word “faggot,” putting it in the mouth of an envious working-class lout who uses it to refer to a rock star “with the earring and the make-up.”
• In Connecticut, David Snead, Waterbury’s superintendent of schools, is trying to stop that city’s Arts Magnet School from putting on a student production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” because the characters, all but one of whom are black, make repeated use of the word “nigger.”
Since these three incidents were the work of cultural bureaucrats who not only believe in mincing words but want to force you to mince yours as well, I’ll put it as bluntly as possible: Messrs. Snead and Gribben and the members of the CBSC are pusillanimous boobs who deserve to be fired. And while one expects such monstrosities these days, what happened in Waterbury is specifically deserving of your attention, embodying as it does a moral cowardice unworthy of anyone who claims to be a teacher….
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Read the whole thing here.