Opinion

I am concerned about a current tendency to confuse privately held opinions, shared between correspondents or confidantes, and public declarations. I am noticing frequent, slow-newsday pieces in the media about leaked emails, which were never meant to be public information. Usually, these emails have something to do with gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality.

A person thinks such-and-such about gay people, for instance, as expressed to a friend or colleague in a private message. Someone gets hold of this by someone else pressing "Reply All" when responding to the email or by some other thoughtless mistake or by some malicious intent to settle a score. Suddenly, the person who wrote the email or made the comment is subjected to public shaming by a press conference held by some anti-defamation group, to whom the email has been sent or comment repeated.

If we all start having the same opinion about everyone and everything, there will be no room for constructive criticism in our culture. Without constructive criticism, we will stagnate and get more stupid than we already are. This is the nightmare of political correctness, which seems to be endlessly encroaching upon society's tolerance for varied or eccentric opinion.

The issue which does not get addressed often enough in these instances is the total lack of ethical accountability on the part of the leakers of private information to public media. In an era when most people rail against privacy violations when it is inconvenient for them, I find it rather hypocritical that these same people salivate over the opportunity to throw stones at someone whose private correspondence is exposed and found to be politically (conformistly) incorrect.

This is all very immature and unconstructive. If you wish to encourage sound, progressive dialogue on issues of difference between people, this type of mob shaming through politically correct media press conferences, based on purloined documents which violate a person's right to privacy, is as offensive, in my opinion, as saying the "f" word or the "q' word or the "n" word. It is the adult form of school-yard, "gotcha" bullying. It accomplishes nothing positive.