Word War, World War

To capitulate on pronouns is not an act of charity. It is rather the total surrender of the world, in a word.

In today’s public communication climate, something as quotidian and unimpeachable as calling a girl “she” constitutes an invitation for legions of enforcers to descend in wrath upon the erring speaker. The sexual revolution’s assaults on the ethic and integrity of the social order are matched by the uncivil methods it employs to upend the community’s normative vocabulary.

Words anchor a culture. They are the depository for the wisdom and observation of generations. A community is found, and its world is expressed, through its language. To destroy its patrimony requires that its vocabulary be abducted. Chesterton—with reason—suggested that words are the only things worth fighting about. Nietzsche, partly right, wrote that unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are.

Chesterton—with reason—suggested that words are the only things worth fighting about. Nietzsche, partly right, wrote that unspeakably more depends on what things are called than on what they are.

From “Child” to “Fetus”

It is particular to our time of upheaval that a pregnant woman officially carries a fetus rather than a child. The word “fetus” has served powerfully to reorient our legal-constitutional system and public moral culture. From dimensions personal to jurisprudential, fetus soothes and justifies.

In 2006, I was in the courtroom of the United States Supreme Court during oral arguments treating the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Solicitor General Paul Clement was arguing in defense of that statute, and at one point he denominated the child subject to the abortionist’s lethal ministrations a “child.”
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