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The scourge of political correctness has reached the last bastion of American free speech -- real-estate advertising.
Some years ago, my friend B.J. Plasket (now the courthouse reporter at the Cañon City Daily Record) and I collaborated on an essay about how one should understand ads for mountain property.
For instance, if you see a phrase like Ski out your
door,
it really means the county doesn't plow this
road in the winter.
Easy low monthly payments
means the last three
buyers failed to make their $39,000 balloon payments,
too.
Towering moss-rock fireplace
could mean no
other source of heat.
Full amenities.
To you, an amenity is a Jacuzzi
or a sauna, but to the ad copywriter, an amenity might be
indoor plumbing
or electricity.
Secluded
means no road within five
miles.
Rustic
means a path and a privy.
Water and sewer available
means one of the
neighbors had to drill only 450 feet at $29 a foot before
hitting a pool of sulfurous brine that eats pipe, but even
if the stuff tastes worse than flat beer, it's good for
your health because it kills giardia.
It was fun to write, but unfortunately for us, any mountain publication that might have printed our work also carried acres of such advertising from the real-estate industry. Various editors said they enjoyed it, but they didn't want to bite the hands that fed them.
In the intervening years, the authorities have acted. Not to inject truth into blue-sky real-estate promotions and thus protect Americans from frauds and scams, but to insure that no one's feelings get hurt.
An article in the June 7 national weekly edition of the Washington Post explained the current sad situation, a result of good intentions gone too far.
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 forbade real-estate
advertising with discriminatory phrases like whites
only
or Christian.
Fair enough. The act was amended in 1988 to include families and the handicapped; it is illegal to discriminate against either in the sale or rental of property.
As a landlord, I've got no quarrel with that. In fact,
we always advertise children and pets welcome
when
we need a new tenant.
However, you've got to be careful how you advertise property these days. If someone is offended, or feels as though the ad is trying to steer a certain class of people away from the property, then there could be a complaint to state or local human rights commissions, regional HUD offices or the courts.
Some phrases that have inspired complaints:
Master bedroom
suggests slavery. (It also sounds
rather sexist, but I doubt we'll ever see Mistress
bedroom
in an ad.)
Walk-in closets
implies that people in
wheelchairs aren't welcome. Convenient to jogging
trails
can be construed as another way of
discriminating against the handicapped.
Spectacular view
could likewise imply that a
blind person shouldn't consider the house. (But couldn't it
also provide useful information to a potential buyer, as in
If I'm blind, why should I pay a premium for a view, and
so this won't be a good deal?
Similarly, why pay to be
near a jogging path if you don't jog?)
Most of these complaints come from Pennsylvania and
Oregon, but doubtless someone will try it in Colorado.
Local ads often boast of property with a mother-in-law
house,
and some single person can claim to feel
excluded by the phrase, and therefore entitled to
restitution from the cruel and insensitive folks at the
realty and the newspaper office.
Even though we supposedly have freedom of speech and freedom of the press in this country, an assortment of government agencies now monitors real-estate advertising, looking for forbidden phrases.
The newspaper could be forced to pay damages after
expensive litigation if it prints a forbidden phrase, and
there's no way of telling in advance what will upset this
new gaggle of thought police. Walking distance,
Near synagogue,
Happy Easter,
executive
living
and quiet neighborhood
have all provoked
actions.
Is there a solution? Nobody should suffer from discrimination, but we're not talking about that here. We're talking about over-delicate souls who demand that society keep them from ever suffering from hurt feelings.
Our governments have their hands full trying to cope with real problems like drive-by shootings, starvation, dysfunctional schools and homelessness, and yet we're also supposed to devote resources to support some thought police just to prevent hurt feelings among the professionally sensitive?
George Orwell saw what was coming when he wrote
1984.
He was just off by a decade.
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