Separation of Church and Hate?

By Noel Bagwell
November 19, 2008

Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times

What does that even mean? Proposition 8 has really stirred the rancor of rabidly gay protesters in California, and one is given to wonder if it’s really all about love or if this is really about their anger at Californians’ resistance to the shoving-down-the-throat (sorry) of liberals’ views that they’ve had to endure for so, so long.

See, the issue of homosexual marriage has nothing to do with love. It has nothing, really, to do with hate. It doesn’t even matter whether or not you think homosexuality or homosexual couples should be legal or legally-recognized relationships.

What it has to do with is the word: “marriage.” That word is the key to a flurry of ideas. In the article Orwell’s Children Bruce Walker says,

Too many of us for comfort or solace have become just like the denizens of Jonestown:  Orwell’s children — a new generation of creature enraged into constant militancy against eternal enemies, oblivious to the notion of a Blessed Creator, melded into the consciousness of the party hive, divorced from history, hypnotized by images, inoculated against reason, stripped of family, and existing only to serve the cause.

Later in the article, he also said,

Language must be brought to heel.  The Nazis did this by inventing meaningless words like “Aryan science.”  Marxism foisted upon us words like “capitalism,” which means nothing at all but which has so infected our minds that we reflexively use this silly nonsense word instead of freedom. Politically correct language is rampant.  We come to view words like “discriminate” as inherently evil, and other words like “viable fetal mass” have replaced the reality of murdered babies.

Image and symbols replace words.  Hitler, whose disciples seldom recalled what Hitler said, always recalled the raw imagery of their leader.  Stalin’s portrait was as inescapable in the Soviet Union as the portrait of Big Brother in Oceania.  We live in a word of symbols and images.  Conservatives succeed in books and talk radio, media that deal in words.  Orwell’s Children live in the realm of symbols and images.

He was very accurately describing the “specific elements necessary for nations with a heritage of freedom to slide into the most absolute and abject slavery,” the “characteristics of the Orwellian state.” But Walker is both right and wrong, we have used images to replace words – where possible – but the key to the smoke-and-mirrors tactics of deception the Left uses to market their wacky ideas lies in the subtle change over time in how we use words.

Orwell hauntingly described the change in language that occurred in Oceania. Liberals in the United States are trying to change language in a way that is similar to that which Orwell described, by classifying certain words as “hateful” or “hate speech” and moving to ban or make taboo the usage of certain words and phrases. This is nothing short of “trimming” the ideas they dislike by removing the words we have for them from everyday use. Eventually we trim so much that we lose words altogether along with the concepts for which they stand.

Walker is both right and wrong because though liberals would rather replace words with images, they also replace arguments (whole thought streams) with loaded words. “Capitalism” is a good one, as is “conservative,” or “a woman’s right to choose” (or the shortened form “womens’ rights”); the list goes on and on and on. Ann Coulter frequently mentions how liberals keep coming up with new euphamisms for themselves, like “reformist,” because she says their ideas are unpopular with the general public. I think they do this to avoid the stigma associated with the loaded words that have come to dominate the political landscape, because conservatives have adopted this shameful tactic, too, sometimes in lieu of having to make actual arguments for which they don’t have time, because the arguments on television news / political commentary shows are rushed, rude, usually misinformed and driven by the political biases of the show’s host(s).

If someone were to try to string together a cogent argument on Keith Olbermann’s program, for example, he’d cut them off, interrupt them, and slam them with a string of loaded terms against which they’d have no recourse, because counterarguments against arguments comprised of loaded terms involves deconstructing the each term, pointing out the logical flaws inherent in their use, and then arguing against each complex issue – something that you just don’t have time for outside of a book.

A funny example of this sort of “editing by taboo” was when Joy Behar flipped out on The View, when Bill O’Reilly half-jokingly called Barack Hussein Obama a Communist. Hey, if the shoe fits. . .  Mr. O’Reilly eventually conceded that, okay, maybe he’s just a “socialist.” Six in one hand, half a dozen in the other, in my opinion. Behar said, “You know what a red flag that is… “Commie” in this country,” chiding Mr. O’Reilly for his humorous remark.

So, it’s not just images – although those are used to great effect to evoke emotions, rather than make rational arguments – it’s “image words,” the loaded terms that come with a whole pre-packaged argument (from either side) that have become part of the modern political landscape. Watch for this phenomenon. You’ll be amazed  to see how you can learn to “predict” which side of an argument someone is on, once you start noticing the terms they use.

A fun exercise (and you can try this at home) is to see if someone is a liberal or a conservative by intentionally using loaded terms, and then watching for a reaction. For example, just using Barack Hussein Obama’s middle name when referring to him or using the word “homosexual,” intentionally, instead of “gay” are all good loaded words to use, if you want to watch someone’s reaction to determine their political stance. I think you’ll find that conservatives, by and large, will bristle less at the above terms – because they’re descriptive, not offensive – whereas liberals will bristle because they call to mind ideas and concepts that they support, but which, as Ann Coulter points out, are unpalatable to the majority of Americans.

To bring the discussion full circle: Liberals know that if they can get the word “marriage” applied to their homosexual relationships, they gain tangential mental concepts like “family,” “acceptance,” “adoption,” “children,” “stability,” etc. and mental concepts like “stigma,” “outsiders,” “odd,” “queer,” “alternative lifestyle,” etc. are marginalized. Liberals and homosexual “rights” activists (pardon the rendundancy) are not satisfied with civil unions because, though they are legally identical to a marriage, civil unions don’t carry the ideological weight and cultural acceptance that marriages do.

That’s what they’re really after: acceptance, social and cultural. It has nothing to do with their legal rights because (1) there is no Constitutional right to gay marriage in any Constitution (including the U.S. Constitution or any state’s Constitution) and (2) if it were about their legal rights, they’d be satisfied with civil unions (and the benefits available to everyone through contract law), and wouldn’t push the “marriage” issue.