Words Matter

So yesterday was the Supreme Court ruling making gay marriage the law of the land.  I was not surprised by the decision, as that is the way our country is moving.

I'm not going to talk a lot about the ruling itself except to say that I profoundly disagree with it.  I won't go into why right now.

I am concerned that our government is quite broken where the courts are concerned.  I guess the court system is sort of democratic, because the judges are appointed by people we elected...but it is down the line a ways from the actual elections. And more and more, judges are overturning the will of the people by declaring (it seems arbitrarily) that a law is "unconstitutional."

All this isn't a huge surprise.  Our Founding Fathers managed to put together an amazing government for its time, but people are people, and sin is sin, and power is power.  Power tends to corrupt.  When a black cloaked judge can decide in his or her own wisdom that a law passed by the people is wrong -- well, that's a lot of power!  And often judges use that power to advance their own agenda (both the conservatives AND the liberals.)  The checks and balances have gotten whacked out.

  Anyway, back to my blog post title. Words matter.

  How EASILY we are affected by words.

  On my Facebook page, on the right side, is a set of 3 headlines every time I open the page.  The current top one is:

 #MarriageEquality  Supreme Court rules same-sex marriage legal nationwide in landmark decision.

  Now Facebook doesn't pretend to be a balanced news reporting site and indeed many of its headlines are so short on actual news that it is funny (the next headline today is about a handsome gorilla at some zoo.)

 BUT...the wording of that headline is SO meant to skew our perceptions positively towards the Supreme Court decision.

  Equality...we LOVE that word.  We are all about equality. We are all about being fair.  Right?

 Landmark decision:  that sounds good too, doesn't it?  We aren't maintaining the status quo.  We are new, and adventurous, and progressive in our country. That is something to be proud of, right?

What would a neutral headline read?

Maybe something like:  Supreme Court rules in favor of gay marriage.

What would a headline read that opposed the ruling?  Maybe...

Supreme Court arbitrarily overturns centuries of human history in ruling that same sex couples can be "married."

I will confess I don't even bother reading the news very much anymore, because stuff like this annoys me regardless of who is writing it.  Most news sites lean liberal, but conservatives are guilty of rhetoric as well.

Kevin and I vote Republican almost all the time.  I know there are plenty of lousy Republicans (power corrupts, sin is there, etc.) but as I've said in a previous blog post, the abortion issue is my litmus test issue.  Show me a pro life Democrat (and they do exist) and I would likely vote for him or her.  Show me a pro abortion Republican (and they exist) and I will vote against him or her.

Since we vote Republican, we get Republican mailings (especially around election time.) We periodically get these stupid surveys from the Republican party.  I say they are stupid because supposedly they are to engage conservative voters to find out what said voters believe about various issues. But oh, those surveys are SLANTED.

Things like...

Do you believe that the Obama administration should force the American workers to pay for the health care costs of lower income and uninsured workers, including illegal immigrants?

Not that that is a verbatim quote.  I'm just giving that as an example of the KIND of verbiage in the surveys.  Words like "force".  Words like "illegal immigrants." Those sway us against the proposal. The survey is not meant to really figure out what we believe.  The survey is meant to tally up an impressive percentage of people agreeing with the Republican party's position on various topics.

The Democrats similar survey might say something like:

Do you support President Obama's desire to provide quality health care for all Americans, regardless of their income and racial status?

Oooh, that sounds GOOD.  "Quality".  "Equality for all regardless of income and racial status."  Buried in all that is the nuts and bolts of the current health care law, which is what we really need to think about.

It is natural for politicians to try and sway people in one direction or another with their words.  That is not going to change.  I do challenge us all to THINK about words, and to teach our children to THINK about words.

It is not easy to do this. We live in a world with a barrage of information. We have long lived in a world where people with skills in speaking have swayed large numbers of people in one direction or another.

Sometimes that has been good.  Martin Luther King AMAZES me.  I am thankful some of his speeches were recorded.  His "I Have a Dream" speech is rightly memorialized.  But even in his case, I want to analyze the WORDS. Yes, I love listening to him. I love the words that roll off his tongue in the recordings.  They sway me, and uplift me. They encourage me.  But the main point is that I actually agree with what he said.

Apparently, one of the reasons Hitler did so well politically is that he spoke incredibly well.  That is hard to believe because he looks like an idiot to me, in the recordings of his speeches that I've seen. But I don't speak German, and he was a German speaking to Germans, and the way he spoke uplifted and directed and drew them to the point that his countrymen (mostly) followed him blindly into World War II, the Holocaust, and catastrophic defeat.

So, let's think about what we read and hear.  Think about the messages.  Think about the underpinnings. Think about the words and how the author is trying to make us feel.  And let's teach our children to do the same.