Offensive and Controversial Stories - The Best Kind of Stories!

These stories will probably make liberals cringe, hence why I love them. First off...

Why Aren't There More Gay People?

I ask because there’s something confusing about our “culture war.” Given the prominence of the issue, you would expect homosexuality to be rampant in America. When asked to estimate how many gay people there are, most people guess that it’s on the order of 20% to 25% of the population. But yet another study has been released by the CDC giving a more scientific estimate, and it finds that almost 97 percent of Americans identify as straight – the actual number of self-identified gay, lesbian, or bisexual Americans is closer to 2.5%. So the public’s perception is off by a gigantic order of magnitude.

It’s almost as if someone has been conspiring to elevate this issue way beyond its actual cultural significance. That is precisely what we find, and both sides are to blame.

In Defense of Old Racist Art 

The Western canon is rife with racism, sexism, classism and every other ism that is. In fact, it is largely the Western Canon that defines these isms. As distasteful as the traditional characters of the Noble Savage or the Magical Negro may be to today’s audiences, they still represent significant steps forward in the racial attitudes of their times. The Bronte sisters may have been 19th-Century proto-feminists, but their ideas about the proper role of women would be well out of place in today’s society. What began in the 1970s as an effort by leftists like Howard Zinn to expose the placid lies in our cultural history has turned into a revisionism, a kind of cultural revolution that values today’s social mores over a complex understanding of Western Culture.

Nowhere is this new whitewashing of cultural history more obvious than in the NewSouth Edition of Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn. The edition, first published in 2011, changes the word “nigger,” which appears 219 times in the book, to “slave.” The justification for the edits is that exposure to hateful words harms students who read the book. In retrospect, this new Huck Finn foreshadowed the current and much maligned trend towards “trigger warnings” for literature. Just as Chan wishes to protect us all from the racism in “The Mikado,” NewSouth Books wants to protect students from the ugliness at the core of Twain’s seminal text. But these protections do a great disservice to anybody wishing to understand our culture’s past and present.

Speaking of Racist Art, comic books have gone off the PC rails...

Marvel Comics announced last week that the role of Captain America—who, like Archie, has existed as a Caucasian since 1941—will be assumed by a black man from Harlem who until now has played a sidekick known as “The Falcon.” The original Captain America—the white one—is giving his role over to The Falcon because he is now 90 years old and too feeble to be a superhero anymore. All-New Captain America is slated to launch in October.

“In 2014, this should be a thing that we shrug off,” says Marvel executive editor Tom Brevoort about the new black Captain America. “It shouldn’t be seen as revolutionary, but it still feels exciting.”

So if it’s no big thing, why did you do it in the first place, and why does it feel “exciting” to you?