Rhetorical Sloppiness
By tristero
It’s very simple: As long as the right’s language is the default language used to describe the world in the mainstream discourse, the extremists win. That’s why no liberal should accept the right’s terms for their objections to the science of evolution, let alone safe, legal reproductive choices.
But it requires vigilance. For example:
[Gingrich’s] latest manifesto, which should have been addressed “Dear Iowa Fundamentalist Caucus-goers,” states: “As litigants demand that courts and judges intervene to create new ‘rights’ out of whole cloth, such litigants and their supporters seek to limit the freedom of others to express their deeply held religious commitments to, for example, the value of every human life and to marriage as between one man and one woman.”
As opposed to one man and three women? Nobody is forcing Christians to marry anyone they don’t want to marry; they’re preventing gays from marrying people they want to marry.
MoDo probably knows better: she almost surely realizes that you most certainly can be Christian AND gay. But religious nuts have so succeeded in characterizing their addled beliefs as Christian (while anyone professing to be Christian who disagrees with them is considered to be just pretending to be a Christian) that Dowd, or her copy editor, unforgivably let this one slip by. There”ve been a lot of these kinds of slips in the past 30 years.
Until the rhetoric of liberals, moderates, and even center-right Americans is more precise and does not, for an instant, buy into any of the language of extremism, the far right will continue to exercise undue influence.
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