"Woe to Those Who Call Good Evil and Evil Good!" Isaiah 5:20

I've been reading Cardinal Sarah's book, God or Nothing. And as I read the excerpt below I couldn't help but think of the quote from Isaiah because we are living it! Perversion of language is all around us being used to advance evils almost beyond imagining. Sin is first conceived in the mind and social engineering begins with verbal engineering. If you can convince someone that an evil is good, something that frees and ennobles one, getting them to embrace that evil becomes relatively easy.

Sunday Meditation: Words Mean Something

NO CHOICE FOR YOU!

My husband and I are reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. In the Preface, Lewis describes the problem of words losing their commonly-understood and clear meanings. Certainly, if that was a problem 75 years ago when Lewis gave the original BBC radio broadcasts on which the book is based, it is multiplied 100X today in our politically correct and politically charged world.

The degradation of some words is obvious. Gay used to be a term that celebrated joy. In high school I had a role in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, a comedy about two young women, fresh out of college, on a European tour. It was a delightful romp. I can just imagine what a play of that title today would be. Just the thought of it brings X-rated images and dirty sniggers to mind.

The word "choice" is synonymous with ripping an unborn baby limb from limb in abortion. I can never hear the word in any context today without the chant booming in my head, "My body, my choice." But don't you dare make a choice that offends the liberal left! In their doctrinaire tyranny they scream, "No choice for you!" and mobilize their verbal weapons of mass destruction to annihilate you.

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."

Semantic Gymnastics and Verbal Engineering

I've been having a friendly disagreement with Catholic in Brooklyn over the situation in New York

with Holy Innocents and St. Francis of Assisi and the pre-pride Mass. She calls me angry and judgmental and, frankly, I think she's a little clueless.

Anyway, the conversation got me thinking about another New Yorker, Msgr. William Smith, a holy moral theologian who often spoke at pro-life and home schooling conferences. (He died in 2009, a great loss to the Church Militant here on earth..) I was blessed to hear him speak on several occasions. One of his maxims was "verbal engineering always precedes social engineering." He described how effectively Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups took the spotlight off abortion by renaming it "choice." It created the ludicrous situation of many, even Catholics, claiming to be both pro-life and pro-choice. Feminists and pro-abortionists advanced abortion acceptance with this brilliant strategy! You can hear it in almost any Catholic Church and, in fact, I have a number of practicing Catholic relatives who claim they are "not pro-abortion, but pro-choice" ignoring the obvious moral contradiction of saying they support both the right to life of an unborn baby and the right of the mother to kill her child if that's what she chooses.

How is this related to the issue at hand? The homosexual community engages in the same kind of verbal engineering with the term "pride" to advance acceptance of homosexuality. It takes the focus off what homosexuals do (sodomy, fisting, fellatio, S&M, etc.) and focuses on self-affirmation and celebration of "sexual diversity" including all its permutations - LGBTQXYZ. The fact is "gay pride" (like "choice") is a political term emphasizing acceptance and celebration of homosexual activity. You certainly don't see Courage and Encourage featured at "gay pride" events because those groups promote chastity. "Gay pride" is the opposite. (Although what, pray tell, is there to be proud of in having a disordered inclination toward sinful behavior?)

When the Franciscans at St. Francis of Assisi embrace the word "pride" they join the same verbal game as the pro-aborts with the word "choice." That their order also promotes the misreading of Pope Francis' out-of-context "Who am I to judge?" statement indicates (to me at least) a disingenuous promotion of the gay lifestyle. And certainly selling all kinds of merchandise featuring the rainbow flag and the "Who Am I to Judge" statement, as St. Anthony Shrine in Boston does, promotes the gay lobby, something Pope Francis specifically condemned.

Consider a religious order offering a "pre-choice Mass" before a feminist march featuring Planned

http://www.cafepress.com/shrinepride

Parenthood and NARAL. Would that be acceptable? Not to me! Unless it were booked as a Mass of reparation for the sin of abortion.  which was certainly not the case with the "pre-pride Mass." The fact that the Franciscans used an ad featuring a variation of the rainbow flag, a symbol of homosexual activism, is also problematic.

Words and symbols have meaning that are not only explicit, but reach one at a subliminal level. More and more young people are embracing the gay agenda philosophically. I believe we can thank the Franciscans for contributing to the confusion, deliberately perhaps? Verbal engineering does, indeed, lead to social engineering and we are rapidly moving toward sexual social chaos.

Another Abomination on the Horizon: Once-a-Month "Contraceptive"

"A contraceptive tablet that acts like the morning-after pill but could be taken up to a month after sex is probably scientifically possible and would be welcomed by women, scientists have said.

"But the authors of a paper in a leading medical journal say efforts to get such a pill on the market could falter because of the political controversy likely to be kicked up by opponents of abortion.

"The authors of the paper in the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care, part of the British Medical Journal group, would like to see funding for exploratory work on a post-sex pill, which they anticipate would be similar to the morning-after pill but used routinely and potentially as rarely as once a month or only after the woman has missed a period. The morning-after pill has to be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex." [Read more here.]

Aren't the death peddlars salivating at the thought of one more way to kill babies in the womb. But it is encouraging to see that they believe pro-lifers would make it politically difficult. I remember back in the 70s the pro-aborts' relief at Roe v. Wade which "ended" the debate. Little did they know it was just beginning because of the zeal of pro-lifers who see the baby in the womb as the least of God's little one. 

And we will never stop fighting! This new weapon of mass destruction, Mary, Mother of Life, pray for us!

U.N. Considers Banning Abortion "Torture"

Yup, that's what their expert on torture says. First they called murdering babies in the womb "choice." Now those who try to stop it are guilty of "torture."

The only thing being tortured here is language, but verbal engineering is what tyrants always do so they can put a nice gloss on their evil deeds disguising them behind high-sounding words. Read 1984 - they called it "newspeak."

"Semantic Gymnastics" and the Dishonesty of Pro-abortion Advocates

Note the refusal to come to terms with the reality of abortion as the women in the video jump through hoops to avoid answering the reporter's question: "What is abortion?" If abortion is so good, why won't they answer the question? Because they have to come face to face with the lie that abortion is not the direct killing of a baby.



From California Medicine 113, no.3 (1970), reprinted in The Human Life Review 1, no.1 (1975): 103-4.

"...since the old ethic has not been fully displaced it has been necessary to separate the idea of abortion from the idea of killing, which continues to be socially abhorrent. The result has been a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows, that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra- or extra-uterine until death. The very considerable semantic gymnastics which are required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices. It is suggested that this schizophrenic sort of subterfuge is necessary because while a new ethic is being accepted the old one has not yet been rejected." ,

In Example of "Newspeak" Democrats Use Franking Commission to Censor Republican Mailings

English author George Orwell invented the term "newspeak" in his futuristic novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (written in 1949), about a dystopian society controlled by a Leviathan government ruled by "Big Brother." Newspeak was an alternate language that grew smaller every year with simplified vocabulary and grammar, reduced metaphors, synonyms, and antonyms. Word control aided thought control. (Consider the dumbing down of the American education system over the last two generations.)

In Big Brother's world thinking outside the limited language box was thoughtcrime or "crimespeak." In newspeak, words also were used in ways opposite to their meanings. For example, the war department was labeled the department of love. (Remember when Michael Jackson made the word "bad" mean good? That's newspeak.)Verbal engineering was one of Big Brother's control mechanisms as it is in the Obamanation as well as in the world of liberalism in general. (Examples abound. Those who advocate abortion are "pro-choice." Those promoting same-sex perversion are "gay." Dehydrating someone to death is "mercy" and the "right to die," etc.)

Now let's take a look at one of the latest Obama/Pelosi acts of newspeak and Democratic tyranny. The Franking Commission is the organization within Congress that approves the content of Congressional mass mailings. Recently they demanded that Republican members sending out mailings about Obama's health care plan must change the expression "government-run health care" to "public option health care." In a town hall meeting, Representative John Carter (R) from Texas used the sentence, “The House Democrats unveiled a government-run health care plan.” The Franking Commission instructed him that for approval of a mailing he wished to send out, the sentence must be changed to either "the house majority (sic) unveiled a public option health care plan" or "The House majority (sic) unveiled a health care plan...." (Note that he isn't even allowed to identify who the House majority is!)

Carter objected to the word police saying, “Why does the Franking Commission have the right to prevent me from freely speaking what I think my folks back home ought to hear and instead tell me I have to speak what the president said last night? [at his press conference]... I think that is an abridgement of free speech.” Members were also told they could not send out a colorful chart depicting the way Obamacare will operate that looks like a Rube Goldberg contraption.

Read more here.

The Democrats attempt to control members of Congress and frame all the issues by controlling the verbal descriptions is just the beginning. With "hate crimes" legislation looming on the horizon the American people better get ready for the Big Brother "crimespeak" treatment. The Democrats haven't brought out the spiders and rats yet to reeducate citizens' thought patterns like Big Brother did in 1984, but give them time. This administration is young. Maybe that's part B of the plan.