LETTER TO THE EDITOR: All men (and women) are indeed created equal

I’ve always adored the English language. Not because it’s my native tongue, or that I’m not bilingual, or that it works well with my Southern drawl, but because it has such glorious and descriptive adjectives that one can, with very little help, paint pictures in words. I was one of those nerdy kids who spent his time in the school library perusing those fantastic dictionaries and absorbing the words that many fail to appreciate. When I got into high school, I looked forward to my first English classroom. That is, until I met the ogre of lexicon, Iva Littlejohn. She was a pure tyrant, and her capacity to comprehend what she taught must have left the station before she arrived. Still, the subject appealed to me until the day she decided to pontificate. Her remark was, “The Founding Fathers were flawed in the Declaration of Independence. They erroneously stated that all men are created equal, and everyone knows that’s a blatant lie.” I could take it no longer, and I raised my hand. Giving me that onerous evil eye, she snapped, “WHAT?” I proceeded to explain that being created and being “born into” are quite different and that the founding fathers had been correct in their choice of words. “No, they didn’t,” she snapped, and I’d doomed my grades in her class, never to exceed a C+ regardless of how many tests I passed without errors. When I read the letter by Alan Gaddis [“Denigrating due to physical characteristics absurd,” Dec. 4], all I could think of was Iva Littlejohn. Then, he proclaimed to be 71 and a Christian. Since I share those traits with him, I figured he must have sat in her class and agreed with her. Trying to confuse physical characteristics, ancestry, birthplace, language, and ancestry is nothing more than gobbledygook created by today’s political correctness. A human is created when an embryo begins development; thus, each and every one of us is created equal. How and where we are born is a completely different aspect. It’s the same with all those created adjectives that make absolutely no sense at all. A phobia is the illogical fear of something (i.e., snakes, rats, spiders, etc.) Why would I fear another race, nationality, or sexual orientation? Because English is so vibrant is not cause to create convenient epithets. The most egregious claim Mr. Gaddis makes is the use of “men” in his errant claims. I’ve seen supposedly educated individuals do anatomically impossible contortions to preclude that little suffix in a word. “Chairman” is now “chairperson,” “woman” has to be “female.” Why is it so incomprehensible to understand that your replacement word also includes that dreaded and awful “man” implication? Pray tell, how does the use of that word exclude anyone at any time for anything? I’ll simply refrain from arguing his other comments in the belief that Mr. Gaddis should spend more time in his dictionary and leave those silly little mitochondrials alone.

George Roof Magnolia