In Well, hush my mouth, conservative MP, Boris Johnson, describes his sparring session with the New York Times editor handling his piece:
“Booris,” said Tobin, “we love it! Everybody loves it. But we have, uh, a few issues of political correctness that I have to go through with you.”
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I had said something to the effect that you don’t make international law by giving new squash courts to the President of Guinea. This now read “the President of Chile”. Come again? I said. Qué?“Uh, Boris,” said Tobin, “it’s just easier in principle if we don’t say anything deprecatory about a black African country, and since Guinea and Chile are both members of the UN Security Council, and since it doesn’t affect your point, we would like to say Chile.”
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So I began the piece with the words, “Gee, thanks, guys,” and Tobin wanted those words removed. For the life of me, I couldn’t see why.
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“OK, Booris, I’ll tell you what the problem is. Our problem is that ‘Gee’ is an abbreviation for Jesus. For a century this has been a Jewish-owned paper, and we have to be extremely sensitive about anything that might offend Christian sensibilities.“We can say ‘God’, ‘God’ is fine, but we have to be very careful about anything that involves the name of the Lord and Saviour.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, “this is insane. This is utterly insane. I really think we ought to try to get that one in….”