Throughout the American experiment in politics, great, aged- fashioned simple- speaking has always been the coin of the realm.  ,
The best social officials tried to communicate clearly, communicate honestly, and use simple language that was likely to be understood by the widest possible audience, even when they were advancing hard thoughts or advancing controversial thoughts. From” Honest Abe” to the” Great Communicator“, some of our best presidents were even given nicknames that referred to their gift for “telling it like it is” . ,
Politicians who earned a reputation for obfuscation or sheer indolence were, in contrast, wronged: Bill Clinton insisted on defining “what the meaning of the word is” while poor George W. Bush gave the impression that he knew what he wanted to say but was unable to summon the syntax to say it.
However, the modern Left has shown itself more focused on bringing up confusion and deflecting than clarifying and clarifying at this time. Even an age-diminiscent but consistently unvarnished Joe Biden is a stronger candidate than many Democrats who pine for the presidential nomination, but the Left has come to view language as a means of manipulation throughout the institutions it dominates. The political class still professes to be committed to the outward projection of plain-speaking language. Donald Trump was wrong: He does not have, as he famously said during his first presidential campaign,” the best words”. To the contrary, the liberal elite has developed a lexicon far vaster, more confusing, and more insidious than any conservative could muster today.  ,
Nowhere is this more evident than in the abortion debate. The terms that have been frequently used in the past to define opposing viewpoints on the practice have always been unintentionally revealing:” Pro-life” says what it means; supporters of the practice advocate for the protection of life from its earliest stages; “pro-choice” refers not to the consequences of abortion, the unborn child’s death, but to the right to choose. In this context, the pro-life movement’s goals have always been much clearer than the pro-choice movement’s, which use the terms freedom and autonomy, which are both very desirable things, but which are completely irrelevant to the subject at hand for those of us who view abortion as an evil.  ,
Many pro-life activists still define themselves with their traditional moniker today, but those who fight against abortion increasingly cloak themselves in the therapeutic terms of contemporary medicine. There is currently a movement to include abortion in the larger category of “healthcare.” In a March Wall Street Journal article about the rise in the use of abortion pills, Amy Friedrich- Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, an organization” committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights, said,” If people need healthcare, they will find ways to get the healthcare they need.” This is far from an isolated example. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists ‘ website even has a section that makes it clear that” the fact is, abortion is an essential component of women’s health care.” Abortion is deemed” a common health intervention” by the World Health Organization. ” Abortion care” is another commonly encountered term.
Let us now pause to ponder the definition of “healthcare”. According to Merriam- Webster, the term can refer to “efforts made to maintain, restore, or promote someone’s physical, mental or emotional well- being especially when performed by trained and licensed professionals”. Granting that abortions are sometimes performed to save the life of the mother, abortions undertaken for elective reasons are, by definition, health- destroying, not health- maintaining, -restoring, or -promoting: They terminate the life, and therefore the “health”, of the unborn. To insist that “healthcare” is advanced through the destruction of life is either to make a mockery of the word or to admit, tacitly, that the only “healthcare” being administered is to the mother, not her unborn child.  ,
Sometimes, the direct use of the word “abortion” is itself a form of mystification. Some years back, the Associated Press Stylebook issued revisions that frowned on the use of “pro- life” and “pro- choice” as modifiers in favor of the terms “anti- abortion” and “abortion- rights”. The pro- life movement is the clear loser in this modification. The revision conveniently removed any references to “life,” the very thing that hangs in the balance in the abortion debate and that the pro-life movement wants to preserve, in addition to removing the positive associations that come with the prefix “pro” in “pro-life.” By the same token, the shift from “pro- choice” to “abortion- rights” hardly represents a change at all: The pro- choice movement has retained its historical association with liberty — whether called” choice” or “rights”, it’s all the same thing.  ,
Whether supporters of abortion use the word “abortion” or not, few will state the truth as bluntly as comedian Bill Maher recently did on his HBO program:” ]Pro- lifers ] think it’s murder, and it kind of is. I’m just OK with that. I am. I mean, there’s 8 billion people in the world. I’m sorry. We wo n’t miss you”. There would be fewer abortion proponents if more proponents spoke out as openly as Maher.  ,
Even when the Left imagines it is speaking forthrightly, then, it is often speaking euphemistically and evasively. The Left uses “healthcare”-like language to provide cover for policies that would otherwise find a few ardent supporters among rank-and-file Democrats. ” Overdose prevention centers”,” supervised consumption rooms”,” safe injection sites”, and the like refer to places where illegal drug use is encouraged and sanctioned, but describing them with words like “prevention”,” supervised”, and” safe”, the verbiage of care and wellness, makes them sound like innocuous places where desperate people receive help rather than an inducement to continue their habit.
Similarly, the transgender movement overwhelms the public with a constellation of terms ( “cisgender”, “nonbinary”,” sex assigned at birth” ) that work to confer the patina of science on its erroneous conception of gender and sex as separate, and changeable, categories. No honest physician, or human being with two eyes, would have said such a thing until 10 minutes ago. When sex change procedures are referred to as “gender-affirming surgeries,” people who are struggling with gender issues are given validation of their issues as though whatever confusion they are experiencing has a ready-made surgical cure. This is especially harmful when young people are given a menu of ‘gender-affirming procedures’. In the instant-classic book she co-wrote with Karol Markowicz, Bethany Mandel argued,” It’s like handing a knife to a girl cutting and telling her it’s a healthy way to express her feelings, or telling a girl struggling with an eating disorder that she does, indeed, look fat in those jeans and should purge to try to lose a few pounds.”
WASHINGTON EXAMINER CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.
When the Left uses gentle language to conceal its agenda, a measure of severity is needed. What’s worse: telling it like it is or talking in circles? Even the now- ubiquitous term “preferred pronouns” sounds innocent enough — after all, “preferred” could be understood merely as its speaker’s request to be called by one set of pronouns over another — but, in practice, it’s used as a cudgel. Email signatures that contain the eye- rolling “he/him”,” she/her”,” she/they”, and so on do not ask but inform the recipient to address the sender in a particular way. Such language has a real and long-lasting impact on civil society. Is it appropriate for a waiter, store clerk, or the child who lives next door to use the honorifics” Mr.,”” Ms.”, or” Mrs.” to represent someone? ” Preferred pronouns” seem to be a plea for politeness, a request that someone’s pronouns are respected, but they achieve the opposite.  ,  ,
When, all those years ago, Trump boasted of having” the best words”, he also admitted that sometimes something less than the best words is called for:” But there’s no better word than’ stupid,’ right”? he said back then. Indeed, the 45th president had it right: Sometimes, blunt words that tell us the truth are better than the best words that conceal it.  ,
Peter Tonguette contributes to the Washington Examiner magazine.
