Whitewash

Gregg Easterbrook---whose criticisms of His Dark Materials are, well, sophomoric (it is a polemic against religion, but it's so much more than that)---nevertheless makes the unarguable point that bowdlerizing the cinematic version of the novels in order to be sensitive to religious people is an insult to Pullman, his readers, and to religious people.

Similarly, while I haven't read Ursula Leguin's Earthsea series, and so have no opinion on its literary merits, I'm willing to take it the author's word for it that the Sci-Fi channel has soiled her work.

The lifecycle of political correctness went something like this: In the 80s and early 90s there were the witch-hunts, and the speech codes, and it took a determined effort by libertarians, free radicals, and a lot of conservatives, to stem the neo-Puritan tide. In the mid to late 90s, came the apologies and the rehabilitations. And with George W. Bush's full-throated carnal embrace of Leviathan, and the Republican party's Popular Front, PC-dom has reached its final synthesis, a weapon of the populist right and overt reactionaries.