Unparliamentary language

3rd February 2012



After a few days’ quiet, the case of Law and Justice MP Marek Suski, who made a blatantly racist comment during a parliamentary meeting, has finally been taken up, with the MP to be called before the Sejm’s ethics committee. He rightly stands accused of using racially inflammatory language, which can carry a sentence of three years in prison. Let’s hope he’s packed off there soon.

Not long ago, when Civic Platform MP Kazimierz Wegrzyn made a risque joke about not wanting to watch gays, but being happy to observe lesbians he was hounded out of the party. His comment, however, was an off the cuff comment in a parliamentary corridor.

Mr Suski has made two outrageous remarks in the main hall of parliament during a sitting, and in a parliamentary committee - in both cases when he was in the workplace. First he made a comment about zoophilia in response to gay MP Robert Biedron, then the, “Little darkie” comment. What a nasty man Mr Suski is.

That said, I’m quite glad the concept of political correctness is so poorly developed here. The whole PC thing is based on one of the dumbest academic concepts ever created - the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic determinism.
The idea is that if there isn’t a word for something it doesn’t exist (so how the hell did we think of vacuum cleaners and space shuttles?). By extension, if you get rid of all the bad words for racism and sexism, the theory goes, then they’ll disappear, too.

Me, I like people to speak their minds, and when I come across people as blatantly racist and homophobic as Mr Suski, I know to avoid them, or punch them.

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