Stephen A. Smith: Political correctness ‘encourages a society to be fake’

Political correctness “encourages a society to be fake,” ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith said in a recent interview.

Smith, co-host of ESPN’s “First Take,” touched on that topic and more in an interview with Armstrong Williams, executive editor of American CurrentSee magazine.

“It’s not about what is, it is about what you project,” Smith said when asked about the negative impacts of political correctness in the sports world.

“It encourages a society to be fake, and as a result, you ultimately find yourself surrounded by nothing but liars, not just as people but as a society: moral bankruptcy,” he continued. “Once that happens, it will take us a long time, if not forever, to get back to the better days that we’ve enjoyed as a nation and as a society.”

Smith also spoke about the media passing judgment on sports figures based on what happens off the field or away from the boardroom.

“Perception has now become reality, or reality has become perception, and the outside world is more alarmed by it than the people are in their own marriage or their own relationship or their own homes,” Smith said. “I don’t know how to police that. I don’t know how to definitively say something is right or wrong unless we’re going to go biblical.

“But if we’re going to go biblical, then everything has to be looked at biblically. We can’t sit there and say that there’s something wrong with homosexuality but there’s nothing wrong with fornication, nothing wrong with adultery, nothing wrong with stealing, nothing wrong with a plethora of things that society will find a way to excuse or forgive whether immediately or over the long haul. I don’t know the answer to these questions. I just know that these are issues and problems and conflicts that exist in our everyday society and it’s something that we need not run away from, but also something that we also need not be too quick to judge, because you just never know what’s going on in people’s private lives.

“Maybe instead of putting our standards on other people, we should be very reticent, apprehensive, and deliberate and methodical in choosing whom we choose to elevate in the eyes of the public as role models.”