Boo-hoo

Just when I start to think it's safe to let my guard down, crap like the following, reported on ESPN.com, reminds me that the dreaded nanny state controlled by willy-nilly weenie "progressives" looms as menacingly as ever:

What do you mean, no booing allowed?

Do we really need a bunch of ultra-leftist, liberal moles with militant feminist tendencies deciding whether you and I can indeed boo and do everything else that makes a jaunt to the weekend sports event the experience it's meant to be?

The degrees of separation are but one or two, at best, between this story and the one about a court in France that avoided convicting a weekly publication of "offending Muslims" with last year's cartoon caricatures of Mohammed. Why? Because they had to go to court in the first place.

Oh, and banks in the United Kingdom have decided to stop displaying piggy banks (scroll down a few paragraphs in the linked article to find the item) because it offends Muslims, whose religion considers pigs to be an impure animal.

I suppose we'll soon be proscribing mid-'90s Quentin Tarrantino movies.

Am I conflating a great many issues here to be provocative? Well, yes. Do I care? Well, no. It's called synthesis, and anyone who sees the thread that connects bans against booing at sports events and bans against anything that offends religious groups understands:

The desire to control and the tendency to be offended come not from a political point of view, but from an emotional one. Emotions can be overwhelming, and because of this, we must not mix them with law and public policy.