Desire

Another one of those words. Timothy Kincaid at Box Turtle Bulletin has an excellent post on the ex-gay movement and how they create their own language while passing it off as one that the rest of us speak.

It's no big news, the way language shapes thought. George Orwell wasn't making it up, you know, and it's become a staple of right-wing strategy at least since the days of Newt Gingrich, the most unpopular politician in America (although he may have lost that title to the president). Look, it's something that the advertising industry has known from day one.

One of the most obvious ways that the right manipulates language is the use of the word "theory" in creationist propaganda. It trades on the multiple definitions of the word, taking a specialized and quite clear definition and trading it off to the at-large, nonspecialized, fuzzier definition without comment or clarification, leading to vast confusion, which is part of the intent.

Also, the term "lifestyle," used with "homosexual" as a description of something that doesn't exist except for a minority of bois who've never managed to grow up, but now a term that can show up in a Gallup poll as denoting a whole (and very complex) subculture based on sexual orientation. (Actually, a couple of subcultures -- it's meant to include lesbians as well, who have their own cultural norms.) Tell me, would you give any credibility to anyone who went around talking about the "African-American lifestyle" or the "Roman Catholic lifestyle" -- or the "far-right Christianist lifestyle"? I thought not.

This is not to let the left off the hook. The very fact that I can refer to "African-American" is an indication of how pervasively the politically correct left has done its work, in some examples to the point of what I can only call "the commonsensically challenged." (If I see one more story about a controversy erupting because "someone might be offended," I think I will probably hemorrage.) I will say, however, that in terms of naming groups, the left at least has enough respect for the various groups that compose our larger culture that they are willing to use terms that originate within those groups, unlike the Christianists, who use "homosexual" instead of "gay" because they are arrogant enough to insist that we are as we are because of a decision we made -- it's a "lifestyle," not an orientation. (And, of course, this only demonstrates that our opinions and feelings don't matter. Nor, for that matter, does objective reality -- note the comment in the post above about "we think of it as a lifestyle." I guess that settles the matter. I'd be interested to hear how some of them refer to Blacks or Latinos in private, given the overt racism of the fringes.) This comes out of one side of their mouths while out of the other side we hear that "everyone is made in God's image and deserves respect for being a product of the Creator." When we're not "intrinsically disordered," that is.

It gets worse, and it's now -- or really, has been for a while -- part of acceptable public discourse. See this little bit of revisionism by the conservatives' great white hope, Fred Thompson. It's very well done. It's also so completely slanted that I can't even find an opening. Basically, he's taking on the activist judges because he wants judges who are going to legislate from the bench the way he thinks they should. With a section on poor abused Scooter Libby and what a rotten person Patrick Fitzgerald is. This is simply manipulating language in the service of a political goal, which is what we see in the ex-gay example and my own examples above. Essentially, one long fallacious argument presented as "normal" discourse by doing a bait-and-switch with meanings.

(Note the Update on my post about Sam Brownback and Evolution, below: As Jack Balkin points out so succinctly, Brownback is doing the same thing.)