Political correctness or political insanity?

    As more new schools are being built in the suburbs of Washington and old ones rebuilt, high schools are searching for new names. But officials are carefully picking and choosing these names in an effort to offend no one and remain politically correct.
    In Alexandria, the mayor and school officials are planning to rebuild the city's only public high school, T.C. Williams. The dispute, though, is not whether it should be rebuilt. Rather, some people, including Alexandria's NAACP president, want to change the name of the school in the hopes of a name that more accurately reflects the community and which can be a role model for the city's youth. T.C. Williams was a former schools superintendent who fought against the Supreme Court's order in 1954 to integrate the nation's public schools.
    On the other side of the debate are people, including the high school's students, who argue that the school and its name are an important part of history. They argue that the film "Remember the Titans" brought the school fame and attention.
    "The school T.C. Williams has transcended the man T.C. Williams," said School Board Vice Chairman Gwendolyn H. Lewis.
    Other schools in the area have encountered the same renaming problem, especially in Loudon County where many new schools are being built and named every year. In 1998, the School Board suggested naming a high school for Margaret Mercer, an 18th-century educator and abolitionist, but named the school Stone Bridge instead and created a policy (later repealed) against naming schools after people for fear of offending someone.
    Other schools across the nation have decided to change names in order to stay politically correct. In 1997, school board officials in New Orleans decided to remove Washington's name from a grade school because the president owned slaves. In truth, most prominent and wealthy white men living south of the Mason-Dixon Line at that time were slaveholders and considered Blacks inferior.
    "If historians or others accept politically correct standards and superimpose them on men who lived 100 or 200 years ago, they will be led, inexorably, to the destruction of those same men," said Roger D. McGrath, a professor at California State University-Northridge and who recently spoke at the American Renaissance conference in Herndon.
    Colleges throughout the country have also participated in the name-changing frenzy. St. John's University changed their team name in 1994 from the Redmen to the Red Storm, and Miami University of Ohio changed their name from the Redskins to the Redhawks in 1996.
    I have a real problem with applying a politically correct standard to school names. In the hopes of pleasing a small minority, are we compromising anything? What comes to my mind first and foremost is tradition and history.
    If we lose the names of Washington and other Founding Fathers from our schools, we lose some part of history. If we lose the name of T.C. Williams, then the high school will lose the tradition and fame it received.
    What happens if the name-changing frenzy caught TJ, and the school board decided that the name must be changed because Jefferson owned slaves? Does that mean that we would forget all the brilliant deeds Jefferson accomplished for our country just because he was an ordinary wealthy white male owning slaves in the South?
    This political correctness needs to be stopped soon, or else the correctness will turn into madness.