It's that time again. We have a major election in November and accompanying minor ones in between. That means that people who watch TV will need to endure hours of screeching political ads, and it also means that there will be people everywhere trying to get you to sign their petition. It has started already.
So I'm walking down the street and a woman asks me to sign a petition for Planned Parenthood. Of course, she couldn't have known that I couldn't have considered signing anything in support of a murder organization that has killed more than Hitler, so I politely declined. Another one asked if I'd sign their petition to outlaw "dirty money." And the whole thing came home to roost.
I did look at what they put in front of me to sign. Neither had anything more than a title. "For Planned Parenthood" on one and "Outlaw Dirty Money 2020" on the other. They wanted me to support their causes based solely on that. But I had no idea what their causes were. Perhaps the Planned Parenthoood proposition was to defund it. Or fund it. Or maybe to make it a government office? Nothing would tell me. The "dirty money" one was worse. Outlaw what dirty money? Money with excessive dirt and grime? Should we test it for germs? No, of course not. So when a candidate (I'm assuming it was "political dirty money") was offered money, the bill would require an extensive check to find out where the money came from? "Did you earn this legally or did you steal a computer from work, sell it, and give us the proceeds?" It was all far too vague.
That's where we've come in this dissolution-of-language culture. When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it prohibited discrimination on the basis of a variety of personal factors including religion and sex. By "sex" they certainly meant male or female, because any other alternative wasn't in view. Today they are working to invest "sex" with modern meaning rather than its original intent, where "sex" is anything at all "on the spectrum." So calling "him" a "her" when "it" wants to be called a "phhht" would be a crime because that would be discrimination on the basis of this new definition (or undefinition) of "sex." The Equal Rights Amendment, brought up in the early 70's and only now achieving enough states to make it an amendment, suffers from the same malady. "Equal rights" meant something different back then and we have vastly expanded the term today and now want to smuggle our new definitions into the Constitution.
I admit it. I complain a lot about language. You'd think it was perhaps too much wrangling over words like this. Just let it go, right? But the loose use of language yesterday has fueled the abuse of language today which will, today and beyond, have real-world ramifications. We are indeed witnessing a modern day "tower of Babel" event where we all think we're talking the same language -- English to English, male to female, Christian to Christian -- and we're not. This will surely come back to bite us.
5 comments:
The ones that bug me are the signs that say "Yes to schools" or "Yes to parks". What does that even mean? I get that they have limited space for a small sign that you're only going to see for a split second, but I'm lucky to even see whatever proposition it is supporting, so how can I even look it up on my own time? Vagueness is the enemy of truth.
George Orwell's 1984 gave the argument that if you control the language, you control the masses. These vague concepts are solidly built on that foundation, and people today rarely even notice.
What's happening to language is potentially the most significant trend in our society, yet its' either unnoticed or minimized.
I think that the group that stands to suffer the most from the redefining of language around gender/sex is women. Much of this conversation is around broadening the concept of what is a woman to the point that the real meaning will be harder and harder to identify.
That's an interesting angle, Craig. It seems in transgender terms these days that the real furor is over male-to-female stuff. There isn't a lot of outcry over girls who think they're guys so they're in the boys' bathroom or want to compete in male sports. It's really the reverse. No one is having a hard time defining "male." Defining "female" on the other hand seems to be shifting all over the place. You might have a point there. (I know there is a group of radical feminists identified by the epithet, "TERF," who oppose male-to-female because it violates definitions.)
I've seen a couple of people write about this over the past year or so and I agree with them. I think most guys would probably welcome girls into guys restrooms, because that's kind of how guys roll. Also because most guys aren't worried about being assaulted or mistreated by a girl. Of course it's not an issue in men's sports, because there's no advantage to a woman competing in a men's sport. (not the certain women can't be competitive in certain limited instances) The reality is that each new gender, is most likely taking a slice of the "woman" pie, not the "man" pie.
The other thing that I just saw is a story about a woman who was convicted of child pornography recently, except I believe that she was a "trans woman" (a man). One question this raised was whether or not we'll be seeing a rise in women committing sex crimes, because of how the perpetrators choose to ID and how much the courts allow them to indulge.
Somewhat unrelated. Every once and a while Matt Walsh will post the question "What is a woman?" or "How do you define a woman?" on his social media and it's always amazing to watch the effort expended to avoid defining a woman specifically.
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