It’s the holiday season once again when we enjoy time with family. You might share Thanksgiving dinner, or shop together, or stay up all night talking with people you haven’t seen for a long time. Maybe you’ll even gather together to watch old movies.

But whatever you do, do not watch the 1984 John Hughes classic 16 Candles. So scolds thin-skinned writer Sara Stewart writing at the New York Post, who claims it is “racist and sexist and needs to be retired.”

She starts by citing the character of Long Duk Dong, played by Gedde Watanabe in the part which brought him fame, as a Chinese foreign exchange student whose name when spoken is marked by the sound of a gong.

But Stewart saves her knives for the lead male roles, whom she accuses of promoting date rape. Yes, that includes Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), the hero, the Perfect Guy about whom the lovestruck heroine dreams. Jake Ryan — wealthy, well-mannered, popular, and drop-dead handsome, the character about whom women would still swoon 20 years after the release of 16 Candles.

Stewart writes: “Jake (Michael Schoeffling) — the supposed Perfect Guy — has a prom-queen girlfriend named Caroline (Haviland Morris), who gets so drunk at his party that she passes out. “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” says Mr. Right.”

But Jake doesn’t. No matter, the buzzkill Stewart is determined to tear down whatever joy anyone derives from 16 Candles. Nor is this her first foray into digging up sexism in popular films; this past spring she accused the Marvel comic-themed Avengers: Age of Ultron as “fair game for slut-shaming.”

The long knives of the perpetually offended are also out for Disney cartoons. One writer found six Disney films — including beloved classic children’s movies — which are “undeniably racist and sexist.” Another hand-wringing killjoy found fifty — fifty! — television shows that are the “most racist of all time,” including supposedly liberal shows such as Glee and The Simpsons.

Ten years prior to the release of 16 Candles, director Mel Brooks released a movie which would make the heads of these politically correct grinches explode. It was called Blazing Saddles, and it managed to exploit stereotypes of every conceivable ethnic and social group.

Blazing Saddles skewered whites, blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Germans, homosexuals, Jews, Arabs, Indians, Christians, women, alcoholics, the mentally challenged, and the speech impaired. It even featured comic moments of animal ‘abuse,’ flatulence, and a shockingly gratuitous use of the N-word. Nothing was out-of-bounds for Mel Brooks.

I saw Blazing Saddles when I was in college. It remains one of the funniest films I have ever seen.

Certainly Sara Stewart and her ilk would assure you that of course we are free to watch whatever films we want. What they really want to do is to shame the public into rejecting these films. They would point their fingers like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, calling us racists, sexists, homophobes, haters, and whatever pejoratives they can concoct to drive us into submission. They won’t rest until our lives are as joyless as theirs.

They will not win. Americans love their movies, but above all we love our freedom, and that includes the freedom to enjoy whatever entertainment we choose, politically correct or not.