Ken Rothman addressed this topic in his paper, "No adjustments are needed for multiple comparisons," which was published in the very first issue of the journal Epidemiology. [http://goo.gl/xlGTTY]
Thomas, thank you for the nice article, which was written by an eminent statistician in 1990. Unfortunately, these adjustment procedures are widely used today without a real understanding of the meaning. As Rothman was explaining in his own words, "chance", which simply means sampling variability, is often misinterpreted.