Victims of words: Reality isn’t whatever we want it to be
By John Stonestreet and G. Shane Morris, Christian Post:
In one of Marvel’s recent blockbuster superhero movies, a genocidal alien-arch-bad-guy named Thanos acquires an “Infinity Stone,” which allows him to change the world around him at will. With this stone, he says, “Reality can be whatever I want.”
Well, many today imagine they’ve got that same mastery over reality—not with the use of a stone, but through words. Redefining words, they think, would magically change reality. It doesn’t, of course. We don’t live in a comic book movie. In the real world, reality is stubborn. Even more, when our words don’t correspond to reality, someone always gets hurt. Or, to paraphrase Confucius, “When words lose their meaning, people lose…”
Recently, we’ve seen several cases of people, especially women, losing the opportunity to win competitions they’ve worked hard for. WORLD magazine recently reported on several international weightlifting competitions where biological men calling themselves women entered women’s divisions and blew away the competition. The words used by these men to describe themselves didn’t change their massive bone structures or muscles, but they did deprive women of a chance at fair competition and victory. As did CeCe Telfer, who went from mediocre male track athlete to NCAA national women’s champion just last week.
Another example of playing fast and loose with words as if it changes reality came from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the State of Indiana to reinstate a 2016 law which banned abortions based solely on sex, race, or disability. The law also required that fetal remains be disposed of respectfully—not simply thrown in the garbage. The justices upheld the body-disposal provision, but declined to rule on the law itself.
In a scathing response, Justice Clarence Thomas detailed the history of abortion as a tool of eugenics. In the process, he referred to women who are pregnant and are abortion-minded as “mothers.” This triggered Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who retorted that “A woman who exercises her constitutionally protected right to terminate a pregnancy is not a ‘mother.’”
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