All Things in Moderation

I have long believed that a key component of the left’s political success over the last century has been its masterful use of deceptive language to frame both issues and their own political positions in ways that make them much more palatable to an unthinking public than they otherwise would be if they were presented more honestly. Indeed, even the use of the term “liberal” to characterize themselves is a bit of a deception in historic terms, since liberal originally indicated someone who favored free trade and limited government, quite the opposite of what liberals have now become. Anyway, with that in mind, I have cobbled together a list of common liberal linguistic lies of our modern age. Feel free to add to the list.

1. Women’s Health – When liberals speak about “women’s health” in a political context, they aren’t really talking about the health of women. They are actually speaking about abortion. So when someone says, for example, that “It’s time to remove politics from women’s health care”, what they really mean is “Abortion should be legal and immune to the processes of democracy.”

2. Reproductive rights/freedom – Like “women’s health”, this is just another liberal euphemism for abortion. Which is a bit bizarre if you think about it, because, if one did not already possess the freedom/right to reproduce, how could one possibly be in a position to need/want an abortion?

3. Marriage Equality – We’ve talked about this one extensively here at ATiM in the past. “Marriage equality” actually has nothing do with equal rights to marry, as liberals try to deceive us into believing, but is instead a call for changing the very definition of marriage from what it has always been to something new such that it can encompass homosexual relationships. Throughout US history homosexuals have always had the very same right to marry someone of the opposite sex that heterosexuals have had. But what they want is a new right, namely the right to “marry” someone of the same sex. Since, due to the very meaning of the term “marriage”, no one, not even heterosexuals, has ever had that right ever before in the US, what they want is not “equality” but rather a new conception of the notion of marriage.

4. War on (fill in the blank) – When liberals say that someone is engaging in a War on X, they don’t mean that one is literally or even figuratively waging a war on X. They simply mean that the person disagrees with them over some political issue that is really important to them. And often the issue isn’t even related to X. For example, the War on Women usually refers to just advocacy for stricter abortion laws. When Obama spoke of Bush’s War on Science, what he really meant was that he had a moral/ethical disagreement with regard to what the government should be funding.

5. Deny – The other day, following SCOTUS’ Hobby Lobby decision, Democrat Elizabeth Warren characterized the decision as giving corporations the power to “deny their employees access to birth control.” Of course the court gave no such power to “deny access” to anything at all. What she actually meant was that the court recognized that certain corporation owners have the right not to have to pay for certain kinds of birth control that are, nonetheless, still legally accessible to their employees. And this is not an isolated instance of such an idiosyncratic use of the term “deny” by liberals. For example, if one thinks that the government shouldn’t dictate what an employer has to pay employees, then one wants to “deny equal pay to women”.

6. invest/subsidize – Liberals often use the word “investment” when what they actually mean is “subsidy”, and then they use “subsidize” when what they actually mean is “not force to pay more money”. So when the government gives money or guarantees to companies like Solyndra and Tesla, it is “investing”, but when doesn’t raise the minimum wage, it is “subsidizing” corporations.

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