If there’s one thing that really sets off my alarms about a cultural or political conversation, it’s the refusal of one side to speak in plain language.
Language control has become an indispensable tool for winning debates. It’s increasingly used to clear the field by ejecting other teams from the game. If the drive for same-sex marriage becomes “marriage equality,” well, what’s left to discuss? If you’re against them, you’re against “equality.” A strong argument should be able to survive outside a sheltered intellectual environment in which all dissent is considered bigotry.
Immigration is the current marquee example of a complex topic that cannot be discussed rationally, because terms like “illegal immigrant” and “amnesty” have been erased from the conversation, to be replaced by fluff like “pathway to citizenship.” That has to be one of the most nonsensical political euphemisms ever deployed to confuse the public. There already is a “pathway to citizenship,” and there always has been. It is readily available to any foreign citizen who chooses to begin obeying American law.
But then, we’re not really supposed to think of immigration laws as “laws,” are we? Not in the same sense that we view laws against any other criminal behavior. It’s more common to see the people who try to enforce immigration law portrayed as criminals. If they talk about requiring a thorough check of immigration status when suspected illegals encounter the police for other reasons, they’re dismissed as a pack of racists who want to drive around with big nets and randomly scoop up innocent Americans of foreign appearance while they’re peacefully enjoying ice cream.
And then you’ve got the abortion debate, where both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” sides have been wrestling for control of the language for decades, as can be seen from the name each side prefers to identify itself. Out on the extremes of the abortion debate, in the grim land of late-term abortions haunted by the likes of Kermit Gosnell, the “pro-choice” side is incapable of speaking plain English. They can’t even talk about babies who are born alive during late-term abortion procedures – they’re obviously not “fetuses” once they clear the womb, but the abortion extremists can’t think of any other term to describe them.
And what sort of common sense does it make to completely change the nature of a 24-week infant by reclassifying him or her as a “fetus” or “tissue mass” just because the infant is a couple of inches further down the mother’s womb? Abortion extremists train themselves never to use words like “kill” when discussing their gruesome trade – it’s all about “terminating” a rogue clump of cells, as though the execution of a faulty computer program was being halted.
In the course of a new undercover video from Live Action, a doctor who performs late-term abortions slips up and almost uses the word “person” to describe the target of his procedure. He catches himself and retreats to the safer rhetorical ground of “fetus.” We certainly wouldn’t want anyone to think there’s more than one “person” involved in a six-month abortion, would we?
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