Semantic Gymnastics and Language Manipulation

Do you ever think about how your are being twisted and turned by experts in language manipulation, semantic gymnastics, and propaganda? I first encountered the term, "semantic gymnastics," in a 1970 editorial in a medical journal, California Medicine. It was titled A New Ethic for Medicine And Society. The unidentified author wrote:

Words, Words Words: Semantic Gymnastics and the Liars' Lexicon

Word, words, words! They can be used to tell the truth and they can be used to lie. How do you use
words? That's a good question for our bishops, don't you think?

Some make words mean whatever they say they mean - like Humpty Dumpty in Alice and Wonderland. So child rape and abuse become "horseplay," "boundary violations," and "inappropriate behavior." Their word manipulation reminds me of Screwtape advising his "nephew" Wormwood. I can just hear the bishop's conversation with the diocesan lawyer, safe-touch coordinator, and communications director.

Bishop: We need a strategy for shifting the conversation away from homosexuality.
Lawyer: Keep talking about all the procedures in place for protecting children and how successful they are. We have the volunteers signing agreements making them mandatory reporters. If there's an incident we can blame it on them.
Com. Director: I'll stress the problem of clericalism with the press and emphasize how heroic your response has been to the crisis.

Plea to Our Lady of Guadalupe: #ConvertTheModernAztecs!

Today on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, I'm praying that the Queen of Heaven will intercede for the conversion of the modern Aztecs in our society:

• Planned Parenthood and all abortion providers and promoters who spill the blood of the innocent and victimize their mothers

• "Researchers" who, like Dr. Mengele, use the organs and tissues of the untermenschen to "advance science"

• The vital organ industry that literally rips the hearts out of living patients so they can give them to others and reap the billions in financial profits from the sale

Thought for the Day: Political Language and Semantic Gymnastics

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearnace of solidarity to pure wind."                                  George Orwell

Here are a few examples of semantic gymnastics that make the unthinkable "respectable."

Humpty Dumpty Was a Liberal or Who Controls the Dictionary?

A well known scene in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass involves a conversation about words between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Here's how it goes:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.


Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master---that’s all.”

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”

"Would you tell me please," said Alice, "what that means."

I thought of this exchange today after writing about "gay pride" yesterday. Pride, according to a "gay" Humpty Dumpty means public enthusiasm for one's sexual identity and practices which happen to be unnatural and perverse. If, on the other hand, a heterosexual tries to use the word "pride" as in "straight pride," to mean pride in his sexual identity and practices, the "gay" activist protests. According to the "gay" the word, in that context, means hatred, intolerance, and racism. (Just read the article I linked to in the previous post.)

Know Your Enemy! The Language of Pro-Abortion Manipulation

One thing that has been clearly evident since the abortion debate began is that pro-aborts will go to any lying lengths to maintain their bloody sacrament. Yes, I call it a sacrament because they are as religious in their beliefs as any Christian committed to Church doctrine. I remember attending a Women's Conference in Richmond back in the 70s during the Carter Administration. Similar meetings were being held in every state and they were supposedly about listening to women. But the meetings were skewed and were clearly about listening to pro-abortion feminist women. In Virginia the meeting was heavily lesbian and I remember visiting the exhibits including tables sponsored by covens of witches. (I am not joking!) It was a sobering and awakening moment for me about the kind of battle in which we were engaged. It's a religious war and the other side has its own equivalent of priests.

Which brings me to the language of manipulation. I've noticed more and more these days that when I read blogs about abortion and sex ed I find people claiming that pregnancy begins with implantation. Of course, biologically that's nonsense, since the little one in the womb is already a week old and about 100 cells before implantation occurs. But the advantage of changing the definition of pregnancy to begin at implantation means you can claim that chemicals and devices that prevent implantation don't cause an early abortion.

It's a lie, just like the lie that the ten-twelve week old baby killed by suction abortion is "just a blob of protoplasm" or a "blood clot" or a "mass of cells." Often the sources used to defend such nonsense are questionable. For example, the Guttmacher Institute claims that federal policy and the scientific community define pregnancy as beginning at implantation - convenient for Planned Parenthood (PP), the largest abortion provider in the world. Ah - but then Guttmacher is PP's research arm. Would you say they have something to gain by their fraudulent "scientific" definition of life's beginning? The morning after pill immediately becomes, not a source of early abortion, but a "contraceptive" preventing pregnancy. (The word contraceptive is a little inconvenient since it means "against conception," but word play is their specialty.)

Princeton, not exactly a bastion of pro-life sentiment, has a long list of sources that define pregnancy as beginning with the single-celled zygote. The claim that it begins at any other time is nonsense and illustrates the policy called for back in 1970 when California Medicine carried an article titled A New Ethic for Medicine and Society. It labeled as "semantic gymnastics" the “avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intrauterine or extrauterine until death.” The editorial also stated that “a schizophrenic sort of subterfuge” was necessary to pretend that abortion was something other than the taking of a human life.  The article defended the dishonesty saying that, “while a new ethic is being accepted, the old one has not yet been rejected.” Interestingly, overpopulation and environmentalism were being used forty years ago to justify the need to lie and control, just as they are today.

Yes, indeed, the "semantic gymnastics" and "subterfuge" continue today. The onset of pregnancy at conception, which was well-known in 1970, continues to be a scientific fact. And the new (and immoral) reproductive technologies make that fact even more obvious. If life only begins with implantation what is in the petri dish before the baby is transferred to his mother's womb during the IVF (in vitro fertilization) procedure? One feminist blog I read said there is no life before implantation. Can the blogger really be so stupid or is this just one more convenient lie to rationalize a personal choice for evil?

The fact is that semantics can be used to fool people, but don't change reality. A builder can put in an elevator with no button for the thirteenth floor to mollify the superstitious. Does that mean there's no thirteenth floor? Of course not. If you call a dollar bill a twenty, will the clerk in the store accept it as one? People that believe things that aren't true are delusional. When an entire culture believes things that aren't true it often sinks into superstition and barbarism. The more serious the issue being falsified, the more serious the consequences of the delusion. History is filled with examples of atrocities that began with lies. Abortion is certainly one of them.

For a great article on the language of deception by Dr. William Brennan go here. As he points out so well, before babies are aborted in deed, they must first be aborted in words. That's what the new definition of pregnancy accomplishes. It's a lie like all the rest to disguise the killing fields.

Semantic Games and Abortion Guilt

Back in the 70s an article ran in the New England Journal of Medicine that talked about the "semantic gymnastics" necessary to the abortion debate. It stated that pro-abortionists use word games to dissociate themselves from the fact, a fact everyone really knows, that unborn children are living human infants from the very beginning. The semantic gymnastics continue today, but occasionally a bit of honesty breaks through the shroud of lies. Sometimes, however, the honesty paints an even more grotesque picture than the lies.

Such is the story of abortionist Lisa Harris who acknowledges that second trimester abortions do, indeed, involve violence. She describes aborting an 18 week old infant at the same time she was 18 weeks pregnant with her own child:

With my first pass of the forceps, I grasped an extremity and began to pull it down. I could see a small foot hanging from the teeth of my forceps. With a quick tug, I separated the leg. Precisely at that moment, I felt a kick - a fluttery "thump, thump" in my own uterus. It was one of the first times I felt fetal movement. There was a leg and foot in my forceps, and a "thump, thump" in my abdomen. Instantly, tears were streaming from my eyes - without me - meaning my conscious brain - even being aware of what was going on. I felt as if my response had come entirely from my body, bypassing my usual cognitive processing completely. A message seemed to travel from my hand and my uterus to my tear ducts. It was an overwhelming feeling - a brutally visceral response - heartfelt and unmediated by my training or my feminist pro-choice politics. It was one of the more raw moments in my life. Doing second trimester abortions did not get easier after my pregnancy; in fact, dealing with little infant parts of my born baby only made dealing with dismembered fetal parts sadder.

Harris' "sadness" has not led her to stop doing 2nd trimester abortions. In fact, she continues to justify them describing that she rationalizes her actions based on whether the child is in or out of the woman's body. This is similar to using the rationale of "wantedness" which judges the baby's value by the mother's feelings about the pregnancy. Both rationalizatons have nothing to do with the baby, but involve extraneous and irrelevant issues. Many people have been unwanted at one time or another and targeted because of where they live. Lisa Harris and others who follow her logic play a dangerous game, one that isn't new.

History is full of examples of "unwanted" peoples whose murders were rationalized by their killers: the Christians unwanted by the Armenian Turks were robbed and murdered while Christians in other nations were unmolested. The Jews unwanted in the Third Reich died in the death camps. They would have survived in America. The Tutsis were unwanted "cockroaches" to the Hutus, but those who escaped to other African nations survived.

But there is another death, worse than the death of the body: the death of the soul. The results of such evil rationalization is the hardening and brutalization of the killers. To go on living their lie they must dissociate from their own humanity and become more beasts than men (or women). Their wills are hardened. The likelihood of them turning back to God becomes remote.

Lisa Harris' rationalization is so complete that she claims acknowleging abortion as violent will be a virtue actually strengthening the "pro-choice" movement. "Honesty," she says, "[can] be the basis for a stronger movement - one that makes it easier for providers and the teams they work with to do all abortions, especially second trimester abortions." If this is so it will be because the killers have become so brutal and hard-hearted they can kill as easily as stepping on a spider. The cost of "easier" abortions is to destroy the capacity for compassion. Harris' strange sentiment is so dissociated from reality, it boggles the mind. It is like Dr. Mengele claiming his grotesque experiments would be easier if he acknowledged the Jews were equal in value to himself. But in fact, he dehumanized his subjects as did the entire Nazi machine. Jews were subhuman; so experimenting on them was no different than using laboratory mice or monkeys. There is no "golden rule" among those who murder the weak and vulnerable.

Frankly, I don't believe Lisa Harris' testimony. Her claims remind me of another pro-abortion woman who defends murdering children. Columnist Anna Quindlen chose to abort her own baby and went on later to write an article about baking "guilt cookies" whenever she had to go on a business trip and leave her living children. They were well cared for, but still she "felt guilty." But wasn't that her mind playing the same rationalization game. She wouldn't allow herself to feel guilty about murdering her poor baby, so she dissociated from it and let herself release "guilt" over something obviously innocuous and not worthy of guilt.

Lisa Harris is playing the same game. She admits abortion is violent and that she is "sadder" now when she kills. But she continues to justify it. Does her "sadness" make her actions less monstrous or more?