great interview with a UC Berkeley linguistics professor on how conservatives have done a terrific job of framing politics on their terms through the language they use. take a look at it here.
[ a brief analysis of some loaded terms follows ]
gay marriage why isn’t it called ‘right to marry’? marriage is about a lot of things, sex being one of them, but by framing the discussion as ‘gay marriage,’ it puts the sex issue above all the other reasons for marriage, which is titillating, but ultimately reductionist. What really matters is the recognition of a pair as the social unit of a married couple — a family — and being allowed the access and support our society offers families. it’s an implied right in our society, and it’s not fair when any couple is denied the help and benefits they need to get through life as a family just because society is squeamish about how some of those couples have sex.
and on another social issue note, i’d rather little put-up-for-adoption Tommy have two mommies or two daddies — basically two people who love and care about him — than let him waste away at an adoption center unloved as a burden on the state or be carted around various abusive foster homes.
which leads into my next term…
partial birth abortion okay, for one thing, that’s not even the proper term for the procedure. the actual term is ‘dilation and extraction’, referred to in medical circles as ‘d&e’ or ‘d&x.’ how liberal is the media? a quick search on google news yields 1000+ references to partial birth abortion rather than a paltry 83 to dilation and extraction. the media’s not liberal: it’s lazy, and it’s doing so at the expense of women’s rights.
The abortion debate is currently being fought in the United States in the context of a perceived proper morality rather than the reality of economic and health concerns facing the women who are actually involved with the issue. Let me say that again: Abortion is a health and economic issue, and should be considered as such. so let’s start with a situation. a teenage girl living in rural appalachia is raped by a classmate. she does not tell her parents because she knows her parents do not have her best interests at heart, will beat her, etc. so she decides to get a court order to allow her to get the procedure performed. while court proceedings are meant to be anonymous, they are often far from it in small town settings. her entire sexual history gets called into question, her ‘moral character’ even though it has nothing to do with the act that got her in trouble in the first place. by the time she has finally received permission to go through the abortion, months have passed, and the possibility of her having a safe abortion dwindles as the fetus grows larger. She will still have to gather together the money to travel several hundred miles to a place that performs abortions, as well as payment for the procedure itself. By this time, she may be too far along for a standard abortion procedure, and being unable to have a D&E procedure performed anywhere in this country, may have to resort to unsafe acts of desperation that can only endanger her life.
so let’s bring in the emotion: what about the baby? what about the fetus? it has a face, it has hands, i saw pictures, etc etc.
i say, look at this teenage girl’s face. look at her frail frame, how weak she looks. look at the black eye and the bruises she received when she was raped. look at the cuts on her face, and how some of them are beginning to look infected. she doesn’t have any health care to help heal her wounds. look at how young she is, and what this will mean to her lifelong health if she goes through with this pregnancy. she may already be malnourished. she will have to find some way to support herself and her child, and do so with the added burdens of poverty and poor health. look at what her life will mean because she’s forced to go through with this pregnancy against her will, because Bill Frist in the Senate says the gruesomeness of the procedure is more important than her very life, more appalling than the life she has to live.
hmm, okay, so that was more than brief. i’ll end this discussion now, but i highly recommend the posted link.