One Little Word - News With Views

Open borders and sanctuary cities—even sanctuary states. “You can be a boy one day and a girl the next, depending on how you feel.” Illegal pronouns. Spend our way out of debt.

These and others—the whole list would depress both writer and reader—are highlights of leftid ideology. They are also the bases for insane public policies which Democrats seek to implement. Crazy ideas don’t get sane when you actually put them into practice. Need we remind anyone to look at Venezuela?

Let’s pick up and examine just one item from the cluttered junk-drawer of progressive thinking. Words, and what they mean to those who use them, can tell us much. Let’s look at a word. Just one word.

“Inclusive.” Is there any reason why leftids feel they must be “included” in everything that other people say or do? Someone wrote to my local paper last week complaining about a columnist’s use of the word “mailman” to describe a man who delivered the mail. “Mailman,” because it does not include women who deliver mail, is “not inclusive” and must not be allowed—even if the individual being described really is a man. You know: an example of Homo sapiens with XY chromosomes.

The letter-writer also complained about the use of non-inclusive pronouns like “he” and “she.” Those hateful pronouns, so unutterably oppressive, imply the existence of two sexes, with one necessarily “excluding” the other. Leftids have a huge problem with “male and female created He them.” So they talk about “pregnant people” so as to include the odd (very odd!) pregnant man, and ban “The Vagina Monologues”—which rather deserved banning, but for other reasons altogether—because it excludes “women who don’t have vaginas,” formerly known as “men.”

But language itself, if it’s to be of any use, is all about exclusion. The more meanings that are excluded from a single word, the more precise it is, and the more useful. So, to take an example dear to the hearts of college students, “Play-Doh” refers to a specific toy, a kind of modeling clay that comes in many colors, and no other. When a Gender Studies major demands a load of Play-Doh with which to console—oh, dear! What pronoun can I use with excluding anyone?—itself after another Democrat loses another election, you don’t hand the poor jidrool an erector set, a yo-yo, or a doll. He, she, or it wants Play-Doh, dammit! But you can’t get your Play-Doh unless you exclude all other objects from the meaning of the word.

That we should even need to engage in such a discussion speaks volumes about the deterioration of our culture.

If everyone you can think of must be “included” in the word “marriage,” it naturally spawns public policies to that end. So we have a Supreme Court diktat redefining marriage to include same-sex couplings, and a multitude of new governmental agencies and regulations to enforce it. If a baker doesn’t want to create a fancy cake to “celebrate” one of these newfangled marriages, because it violates his or her religious convictions, then in the name of Inclusion, that baker’s livelihood must be destroyed. If he’s the only one of 300 bakers in a city who balks at taking part in a “gay wedding,” they will find him and destroy him as an enemy of the people.

All because of one little word.

There are a lot of little words floating around today that are being used to reshape our way of life whether we like it or not. Diversity. Tolerance. Justice. They’ve really done a job on “justice.” That “diversity” now means uniformity, “tolerance” intolerance, and “justice” injustice, is not something that bothers any leftid for a moment.

But it really ought to bother us.

I have discussed these and other topics throughout the month on my blog, http://leeduigon.com/ . Why not stop in and visit? A single click will take you there.

E-Mail Lee Duigon: leeduigon@verizon.net