CajunCenturion,
Well, I just believe it is so, because I haven't seen any messages of insulted people asking to stop using that (or any other) smiley; also I believe all (most?) of them are still there and hadn't been red-flagged; and last, the whole set of 'offending' symbols, some of them racially and otherwise classifying people, is still there and there is no remark from Tek-Tips next to them, warning that some of those pictures are potentially politically incorrect. Am I missing something?
This thread is starting to remind me couple of threads on political correctness from "Information Technology Ethics in the Workplace" forum - swastika in the font set, master-slave terminology, etc. No one in particular is insulted yet, but someone just assumed that it could be potentially insulting to some group of people to which, most likely, that someone doesn't belong personally, but we should ban this [fill in] anyway, because it's just not right to have it, even though it was there for years and may have different meaning to different people.