Adherents to descriptive linguistics

Ever notice how, as soon as someone learns about cultural relativism, descriptive linguistics, or similar schools of thought, they tend to get all uppity and offended by things like prescriptivism in their own culture?

As an example, consider the descriptivist who starts bitching about a schoolteacher's teaching of grammar because it's prescriptivism. I always smile at this because the descriptivist has missed the point quite badly and considered it best depicted by, for instance, a multicultural society that accepts multiple points of view.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies. Ideally, a descriptivist perspective should explicitly preclude the making of any value judgments about any feature of the system being studied.

As an aside, and admittedly somewhat unrelated to linguistics, it bothers me when so-called adherents to cultural relativism complain about the failure of non-European societies to enforce European concepts of human rights. For those people who complain about Arab women being required to wear headdresses, I can only wonder what they would say about homosexual rites of passage of the Marind-anim people...

>Descriptivism means to objectively describe a language system, and this includes objectively describing its prescriptivist tendencies.

Linguistics describes what people say not what people say what they say.

Prescriptivists are a lot of the times absolutely wrong about what they say they say. Example: Orwell says passives are bad. Yet he himself, who many consider to be a great writer, uses passives much more frequently than the average writer.

Is there not a point in pointing out out-right lies?