A sure sign of p.c. thinking is when the other side of a controversial subject is successfully identified as forbidden territory. To cross the invisible boundary that embargoes a politically incorrect view renders one's motives immediately suspect. To argue the position is a sign of one's indecency. It is to mark the holder of the position as a bad person, a relic of the reactionary past, an obstacle on the path to human progress.

This was the object of the campaign of vilification I encountered when I suggested that reparations for an injury committed 136 years ago and payable on the basis of skin color instead of injury was "a bad idea and racist too." For the heresy of opposing the left on an issue it considered a political litmus, I was accused of expressing ideas that were "offensive," and then tarred and feathered as a bonehead "racist." The attacks weren't limited to me; they were also directed at the journalistic institutions that printed my ad in the interest of free speech. My Salon colleague Joan Walsh accurately described these attacks as "political correctness run amok. Yet they were also lent credence and support by pundits who generally opposed political correctness like Jonathan Alter, Clarence Page and the Washington Post's Richard Cohen.

This is a sure sign that the tenets of political correctness are still very much alive and well. An interesting case of this was recently provided by my good and courageous friend Andrew Sullivan in a column that appeared in the New York Times Magazine. In it, Sullivan addressed the subject of gays in the military in a way that I found morally persuasive and poignant on the one hand, but politically correct and obtuse on the other.

His column was titled "They Also Served," and it asked for "some ... recognition in today's war nostalgia of the role that gay men have played in the past in defending their country." In the film "Pearl Harbor," for example "Cuba Gooding Jr. played the brave segregated Negro, fighting back for his country." In "Saving Private Ryan," "the sensibilities of the '90s were projected backward. We didn't see just soldiers; we saw a Jewish American soldier, an Italian, a WASP and so on." Actually, Sullivan is wrong on that count. This wasn't the sensibility of the '90s. It was the same sensibility I saw as a kid in the 1940s when World War II films invariably featured the identical rainbow and, in features like "Home of the Brave," included black soldiers and was accompanied by a powerful anti-discrimination theme.

This is the part of Sullivan's argument I can wholeheartedly embrace -- and I believe a majority of Americans do, too. When a socially conservative president appoints an openly gay man to an administration post, it is a sign that things have really changed. But the recognition of gays who served the country was not Sullivan's main agenda in his New York Times Magazine essay. Having established the point that we should, but do not, acknowledge the service that gay men have performed for this country, he wants to use it as a wedge for the argument that the armed services should abandon their "Don't ask, don't tell" policy and embrace a gay presence in their ranks. Sullivan calls this goal a "diverse military" and wonders why "we seem to be going in reverse."

It is at this point that Sullivan's argument abruptly incorporates the telltale syntax of political correctness. His opponents are reactionaries, prejudiced against "diversity" -- i.e., gays. The assumption is that no serious rationale other than lingering social prejudice exists for current military policy. Opposing it requires no military argument, while defending it is a sign of failure to fully qualify for the ranks of the decent and humane. As Sullivan presents the case, no other possibility exists.

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